Two days before Super Tuesday, Democrats Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton sparred yesterday over Social Security, healthcare, and electability, while Mitt Romney intensified his efforts to rally conservative voters to his side by sounding the alarm about his chief Republican rival, John McCain.
With polls across the country showing a tightening race heading into 22 Democratic primaries and caucuses tomorrow, Obama and Clinton appealed to undecided voters on the stump and on the airwaves.
In California, the biggest prize, which Clinton has long been expected to win, two polls released yesterday - by McClatchy-MSNBC and the Field Poll - showed her up only slightly over Obama. A Zogby/Reuters poll had Obama up by four percentage points - the first time he has led in any survey.
In the Republican race, McCain, the clear front-runner in polls after strong wins in New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Florida, looks to deliver a knockout blow against Romney and former governor Mike Huckabee of Arkansas.
McCain, who campaigned yesterday in Connecticut before heading to Romney's backyard in Boston, said on CBS's "Face the Nation" that he is "far more conservative" than Romney.
He also said he will try to win over some conservative Republicans by promising to appoint judges in the mold of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito. He said he didn't remember saying, as some conservatives have alleged, that Alito "wore his conservatism on his sleeve."
Romney, at a rally of several hundred supporters at the College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn, Ill., introduced a new cheer in which he asked the audience if they wanted a president who, like McCain, voted against President Bush's tax cuts. "No!" the crowd shouted. Did they want a president who opposed drilling for oil in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge? "No!"
Romney then cited the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, the McCain-Kennedy immigration bill, and the McCain- Lieberman energy cap-and-trade bill.
"I'll tell you what we need," Romney said, "is a person who will stand up for the principles of the Republican Party and live in the house that Ronald Reagan built and win the White House again!"
The former Massachusetts governor also criticized McCain by calling him "virtually indistinguishable from Hilary Clinton or Barack Obama on a number of major issues our country faces."
Huckabee, who hasn't won since Iowa and is short of money, insisted he's in the race for the long haul. He said it was time for Romney, not him, to drop out. "If he wants to call it a two-man race, fine," Huckabee said on CNN. "But that makes it John McCain and me."
In the Democratic race, the Obama team - accused last week by the Clinton campaign of distributing a misleading mailer about Clinton's healthcare proposal - shot back at the New York senator's campaign, accosting the Clinton camp for a mailer sent to Massachusetts households that claims Obama would raise taxes by a trillion dollars.
That's nearly one-third of the size of the federal budget, and a charge that Representative William Delahunt of Massachusetts called "absurd."
"My first reaction was, 'Someone's joking,' " Delahunt, who has endorsed Obama, said in a conference call with reporters. "It tells me that there is panic inside the Clinton campaign."
The trillion-dollar figure is based on Obama's proposal to lift the cap, though not entirely, on the amount of earnings subject to the Social Security tax. Currently, only earnings up to $97,500 a year are subject to the FICA tax, meaning people earning $30,000 a year pay a higher Social Security tax rate than people earning many millions of dollars a year.
But the Clinton campaign's mailer said Obama "wants to raise Social Security taxes by a trillion dollars." Clinton spokesman Phil Singer said outside analysts have backed up the trillion-dollar figure.
However, Obama's economic adviser, Austan Goolsbee, said that number could only be true if the cap were lifted entirely and immediately on all wage-earners - something he said Obama does not support. "It isn't Senator Obama's policy, it isn't a trillion dollars, and it isn't on the middle class," Goolsbee said.
The campaigns also jostled again over healthcare after Clinton went farther than she has before in saying she was open to stringent measures to bring about universal healthcare, including withholding money from people's paychecks.
"I think there are a number of mechanisms," she said on ABC's "This Week, "going after people's wages, automatic enrollment, when you are at the place of employment, you will be automatically enrolled, whatever the mechanism is."
The issue goes to the heart of her biggest policy difference with Obama. She takes him to task for not making his plan universal, but he said it's unfair to force people who can't afford insurance to pay for it. His campaign suggested yesterday that her latest comment was evasive.
"Hillary Clinton again refused to directly answer the question of how she would enforce her mandate that people buy health insurance even if they can't afford it except to hint that she would potentially be 'going after people's wages,' " Obama spokesman Bill Burton said.
Obama, speaking on CBS's "Face the Nation" before campaigning in Wilmington, Del., also raised the issue of electability, arguing that Republicans and independents would be more inclined to support him than Clinton in November.
The problem is "not all of Senator Clinton's making," he said, "but I don't think there's any doubt that the Republicans consider her a polarizing figure."
riskier choice for Democrats.
At a rally in Bridgeton, Mo., Clinton hit back, saying politics is "no cake walk," and referred to her 15 years of fighting with Republicans.
"My opponent," she said, "hasn't had to go through that kind of baptism by fire."
Marcella Bombardieri and Scott Helman of the Globe staff contributed to this report. Material from the Associated Press was also used.
