White House race shifts to next battles

[Ron Burgundy]

Reuters - The presidential race shifted to new battlegrounds on Sunday, as Republican John McCain looked for momentum from a big win and top Democrats paid homage to slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King.

In an ABC interview, Democrat Barack Obama fired back at Bill Clinton, calling the former president's recent criticisms "troubling," before appearing at an evening rally to kick off his South Carolina campaign.

McCain flew to Florida, which holds the next Republican contest on January 29, and said his win over rival Mike Huckabee in South Carolina would give him a boost toward the nomination for the November election.

"I think we are doing very well. I think Florida is very important. I don't know if it's a must-win, but it's certainly a very, very important race," the Arizona senator told reporters before leaving South Carolina.

Florida will mark the re-emergence of Rudy Giuliani, whose once large lead in national polls disappeared as he sat out the early battles. The former New York mayor has staked his future on Florida, where polls show a tight race with McCain and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

"We're ready for everybody to come down here, join us," Giuliani said on ABC's "This Week."

The Democratic presidential contenders turned their attention to South Carolina, where Saturday's primary will give Hillary Clinton and Obama a new venue for their back-and-forth battle for the nomination after Clinton's weekend win in Nevada.

More than half of the voters in South Carolina's Democratic primary are expected to be black, and on the eve of a national holiday honoring King's birthday both candidates spoke at black churches.

At the civil rights leader's home Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Obama quoted King's belief that "unity is the great need of the hour" and said it was still needed today to overcome a deficit in America.

"I'm talking about a moral deficit. I'm talking about an empathy deficit," said Obama, an Illinois senator who would be the first black president, before heading to South Carolina for an afternoon rally.

'WE CANNOT WALK ALONE'

"I'm taking about an inability to recognize ourselves in one another, to understand that we are our brother's keeper, we are our sister's keeper," he said. "In the struggle for opportunity and equality, we cannot walk alone."

Clinton, a New York senator who would be the first woman U.S. president, spoke to a predominantly black Baptist church in New York City's Harlem and reminded the congregation King was supporting striking garbage workers when he was assassinated in Memphis in 1968.

"He was leading the charge for economic justice," she said. "He understood that we can push the limits of our laws, we can eliminate on paper so many of the discriminatory practices that have unfortunately marked and marred our history, but we have to do so much more."

Neither party has established a clear front-runner in the race to pick the two candidates to contest the November 4 election to succeed Bush, as the first major state-by-state battles produced multiple winners.

In Obama's ABC interview, set to air on Monday, he said Bill Clinton's recent criticisms of his record were untrue and he planned to confront them.

"You know the former president, who I think all of us have a lot of regard for, has taken his advocacy on behalf of his wife to a level that I think is pretty troubling," Obama said in an ABC interview to air on "Good Morning America."

Clinton recently said Obama's early opposition to the Iraq war was "a fairy tale" and said his union backers in Nevada were suppressing the vote of Clinton supporters. Obama said the statements were not supported by the facts.

"This has become a habit, and one of the things that we're going to have to do is to directly confront Bill Clinton when he's making statements that are not factually accurate," Obama said.

The Clinton campaign stood by the criticisms, saying "facts are facts."

"President Clinton is a huge asset to our campaign and will continue talking to the American people to press the case for Senator Clinton," spokesman Phil Singer said.

In Nevada, Clinton beat Obama in a close struggle that featured voting in the state's famed casino hotels and accusations of voter suppression by both camps.

The pair had split the first two Democratic contests, and because of his strength in some rural areas Obama claimed one more national convention delegate in Nevada even though Clinton won more votes.

Delegates select the presidential nominee at the party convention in August. The Nevada delegate slate will not be set until April and the count could change before then, state party officials said.

Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards was a distant third in Nevada but promised to push on. All three Democratic contenders will appear in a debate on Monday in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

"When you get knocked down, you have got to get up. You have got to get up and start fighting again," Edwards, who won South Carolina during his failed presidential run in 2000, told

CNN.

(Additional reporting by Steve Holland in South Carolina, Matt Bigg in Atlanta, Jeff Mason in New York; Editing by Chris Wilson)

(To read more about the U.S. political campaign, visit Reuters "Tales from the Trail: 2008" online at http://blogs.reuters.com/trail08/)

source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080121/pl_nm/usa_politics_dc [link]