Obama had the tougher night

Forget the jobless, despairing voters in small towns across Pennsylvania. Last night, it was the Democratic presidential debate that was bitter.

Again and again during a nationally televised debate, the two candidates wrangled over the political sideshows that have come to dominate the campaign.

Sen. Barack Obama was thrown on the defensive about everything from comments by his former pastor to his friendship with a member of the radical Weather Underground, to why he rarely wears an American flag pin in his lapel.

It could not have been the performance Obama wanted to have six days before the state's primary, at a time when he needed to reassure voters who might have been put off by his recent remarks about "bitter" small-town residents in the state who "cling" to religion and guns because of their economic frustration.

At one point Obama said, "I revere the American flag – and I would not be running for president if I did not revere this country." That is not a good thing for a candidate to have to say.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton got off a little easier during the first half of the ABC News debate, but she had to explain why she had mischaracterized being under sniper fire during a trip to Bosnia as first lady.

"We both have said things that, you know, turned out not to be accurate," Clinton said. "You know, that happens when you're talking as much as we have talked."

It was a good thing for Clinton that the TV moderators carried the brunt of the attacks on Obama. She could not afford to because she is in a tough strategic position, facing a nearly insurmountable deficit in the delegate count and a narrowing lead in Pennsylvania.

With dwindling opportunities to change the race, Clinton needed the platform of the debate to continue sowing doubts about Obama's electability, but she risked blowback. As a general rule, politicians who go on the attack drive up negative perceptions of themselves almost as much as of their intended targets, and Clinton began the race with higher negatives than most public figures.

Two polls out yesterday illustrated her problem.

A Washington Post/ABC News survey found that Clinton was viewed unfavorably by 54 percent of voters, up 14 percentage points since January. By comparison, Obama's negative score was 39 percent. The poll also found that 58 percent of respondents said Clinton was not honest and trustworthy.

Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg state surveys of Pennsylvania, Indiana and North Carolina had similar findings. When Pennsylvania Democrats were asked to choose who was more admirable, 47 percent named Obama, 26 percent Clinton.

This was the 21st debate of the Democratic campaign and the first between Clinton and Obama in six weeks. Since then, the campaign has been full of twists and turns: comments by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright seen as anti-American and racist; Clinton's Bosnia trouble; the dismissal of Clinton's chief strategist after he lobbied for a trade deal the candidate opposes. And then Friday, the Obama comments about small-town bitterness.

Still, little has changed fundamentally in the campaign, and the debate illustrated that as it plowed over familiar ground of who is more in tune with ordinary people.

Obama spoke of the "generosity and core decency" of the people he had met in Pennsylvania, and under questioning, he said that he had "mangled" his words about small-town residents and did not mean to demean them and their values.

"The problem with politics is that you take one person's statement, if it's not properly phrased, and beat it to death," he said, "and that's what Sen. Clinton's been doing over the last four days. It's not helping the person who's sitting at the kitchen table trying to figure out how to pay the bills at the end of the month."

Clinton, when it was her turn to address the remarks, reminded viewers that she was the granddaughter of a Scranton mill worker, and not the former first lady with $109 million family income over the last eight years.

"I don't believe that my grandfather or my father or the many people whom I have had the privilege of knowing and meeting across Pennsylvania over many years cling to religion when Washington is not listening to them," Clinton said. "I think that is a fundamental sort of misunderstanding."

At its core the debate boiled down to this familiar argument: Obama saying that politics itself was broken, its games not worth playing, and Clinton saying that skill at the game was crucial.