Dueling Appeals On Taxes From Obama, Clinton

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Democrats Split Indiana and North Carolina

Sen. Barack Obama won North Carolina's presidential primary by a wide margin Tuesday, while Sen. Hillary Clinton narrowly won in Indiana.

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In ignoring a question about whether any prominent economist embraces the gas tax holiday, Clinton defended her proposal and attacked "this mind-set where somehow elite opinion is always on the side of doing things that really disadvantage the vast majority of Americans."

"I'm not going to put my lot in with economists," Clinton said in a town hall meeting organized by ABC's "This Week With George Stephanopoulos." "When the federal government, through the Fed and Treasury, gave $30 billion in a bailout to Bear Stearns, I didn't hear anybody jump in and say, 'That's not going according to the market, that's rewarding irresponsible behavior.' "

The former first lady was combative in her TV appearance, putting host Stephanopoulos on the defensive by suggesting that he, like her, was a private opponent of the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement in the Bill Clinton White House.

"Now, you remember this, because George did work in that '92 campaign, and George and I actually were against NAFTA," Clinton said, referring to Stephanopoulos's work as a senior adviser to Bill Clinton. "I'm talking about him in his previous life, before he was an objective journalist and didn't have opinions about such matters."

Focusing on the economy in their talk show appearances, Clinton and Obama played down the controversial comments of the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., the former pastor of Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ, which Obama attends. Clinton, when asked about Wright at the town hall meeting, said that "we should definitely move on" from the issue.

Obama, meanwhile, said that he would "absolutely not" seek Wright's counsel if he were elected president.

Despite the stakes and the toll of the long campaign, both candidates appeared in good spirits.

"I've been talking all the time; can I get a throat lozenge?" Clinton said in South Bend as she began coughing and briefly lost her voice. "Glass of water," she shouted.

"See, that's why we need universal health care," she said to laughter. She cut her standard stump speech down to about 20 minutes.

Obama played basketball in Elkhart, joking that he was a "pressure player" as he knocked down several shots, although he lost the game to a local 14-year-old.

Over the weekend, Obama showed up at picnic sites, playgrounds and roller-skating rinks across Indiana with his wife, Michelle, and daughters Malia and Sasha. The girls had not appeared on the campaign trail since before January's Iowa caucuses. Obama even visited a house in Noblesville that his mother's family had owned for generations before moving to Kansas.

Obama was not reaching his usual crowds of thousands in the small-scale events, but campaign advisers were betting that the images would resonate more effectively with Indiana voters by showing Obama as down-to-earth and in touch with ordinary Hoosier life. He kept his prepared remarks short, focused on his critique of Clinton's proposed gas tax holiday and offered a hefty dose of personal detail, including how his grandfather had gone to college on the GI Bill and how his mother had collected food stamps.

The Clinton campaign sought to introduce a new issue into the campaign in its late stages. A mailer criticized his stance on the Second Amendment and said: "Where does Barack Obama really stand on guns? Depends on who Barack Obama is talking to." The flier invoked his controversial comments during a closed fundraiser that working-class voters "cling" to guns and religion because they believe that the government has let them down.