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White House race goes national
10/01/2008 10:03 - (SA)
Jitendra Joshi
Washington - After an energy-sapping slog for votes across the frozen north, White House hopefuls fanned out on Thursday as the 2008 presidential race went national in a series of battleground states.
Hillary Clinton, basking in the glow of her shock win over Barack Obama in Tuesday's Democratic primary in New Hampshire, was "fired up" for the battles to come after some pundits had been busy drafting her political obituary.
The steely Clinton credited part of her New Hampshire revival to her unvarnished inner self being exposed when she nearly wept during a campaign stop on Monday, as she spoke of her passion to remake America.
It was "just a really wonderful moment", the New York senator told CNN. Everyone had seen "why I'm going to wage this campaign for the future of our country and to give everybody the same set of chances that I was given".
Unbowed by his surprise defeat in New Hampshire and still preaching an electrifying sermon for change, Senator Obama was to campaign on Thursday in South Carolina, the first southern state voting in the 2008 race.
At a raucous rally Wednesday in New Jersey, Obama spoke of the physical toll that this marathon campaign is taking: his voice was hoarse, his eyes were bleary and his back was sore, "but my spirit is strong!"
The candidate bidding to be America's first black president said that he was relieved to be back in "insurgent" mode against the Clinton machine, after his coup in last week's Iowa caucuses had sent expectations rocketing.
"And I feel a lot more comfortable now understanding this is a victory we are going to have to earn," he told MSNBC News.
Republican TV debate
Fireworks were likely as Republican candidates prepared to hold a televised debate on Thursday evening in South Carolina, with their party's race blown wide open by Senator John McCain's triumph in New Hampshire.
McCain and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney decamped from New Hampshire to campaign in Michigan ahead of its primary on January 15, before heading south for the debate.
After his lavishly funded campaign foundered in Iowa and New Hampshire, Romney must win Michigan, the state of his birth, where his father was a popular governor before seeing his own presidential hopes falter in 1968.
The Republican winner in Iowa, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, lost no time in wooing South Carolina's committed evangelical conservatives.
"We have been thrilled to be a part of those states, but we haven't seen anything but ice and snow for the past three weeks," the folksy Baptist preacher told supporters in the state Wednesday, glad to be back south.
Even further south, former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani remained camped out in Florida as he pursued a high-risk strategy of bypassing the early states in the hope of seizing the Republican mantle in later contests.
- AFP
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