Obama heats up rivalry in Iowa

DES MOINES, Iowa — As he travels through Iowa, White House hopeful Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) is cranking up the argument that chief rival Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) has too much baggage to be elected president.

He also said if he does not do well in Iowa, it will not be because he is African American.

“If you start off with half the country not wanting to vote for you, you don’t have a lot of margin for error,” Obama said Friday in reference to Clinton — not by name — during a taping of Iowa Public Television’s “Iowa Press” political program to be broadcast later this weekend.

At a town hall meeting in Knoxville, Iowa, on Thursday evening, Obama, without mentioning Clinton by name, said he is the most electable Democrat because he has no history of “generating anger among Republicans.”

For more than a decade, Republicans have railed against Clinton — as first lady and as now senator — and still furiously invoke her name in fund-raising solicitations.

Meanwhile, Clinton touted the endorsement Friday of Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland, who said she could win the crucial battleground state and had no doubts about her ultimate electability. Ohio is one of a handful of swing states that will influence who wins the 2008 general election.

Friday, Clinton, in a conference call with Strickland, pushed back when asked if she would hurt down-ticket candidates if she ran at the top of the ballot. People care about, “who can win,” she said, “who can be able to run an effective, victorious campaign, because at the end of the day, in order to implement the policies that I care about and that Ted Strickland cares about, we have to take back the White House.”

Strickland said he was making the endorsement because “I feel strongly that she is the candidate that can speak to the issues important to Ohioans, and that she can carry Ohio.”

At the television taping, Obama was asked if being African American could effect his race in Iowa — only 2 percent of the Iowa population is African American.

He said Iowans have gotten past that and just want a president who is effective: “I think we’ve made enormous progress in a generation, certainly since I was born in the early 1960s, and I think people right now are much more concerned about who is going to look out for them who is going to fight for them, who is going to bring about the kind of change that is needed in Washington.”

The next week could well change the dynamics of the Democratic contest. The Iowa state party sponsors a giant dinner tonight with 9,000 Democratic activists. New polls to be released soon will show front-runner Clinton dropping some in New Hampshire. And Democrats meet for another debate in Las Vegas on Thursday.