Pollsters try to explain Obama's loss in N.H.

It was one of the nagging mysteries of the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries: Why were the polls so wrong in New Hampshire?

Coming off his victory in the Iowa caucuses and drawing large crowds, Barack Obama was ahead in the final surveys and appeared primed to all but sew up the nomination by winning the January contest. But Hillary Rodham Clinton, who the day before the primary choked up when talking about why she was in the race, pulled off her version of the "comeback kid" routine, won the Granite State primary by 39 percent to 36 percent over Obama, and ended up staying in the race until June.

In a report released yesterday, a panel of polling specialists didn't come to any definitive conclusions, but said that the polling probably ended too early to take into account late movement among voters.

Also, Clinton supporters were harder to reach and some pollsters did not try more than twice, skewing the sample toward pro-Obama voters, said the committee organized by the American Association for Public Opinion Research.

The panel discounted other possible explanations, such as the so-called "Bradley effect," in which some white voters say they will support a black candidate, but don't vote that way in the privacy of the polling booth.

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The Rev. Gloria White-Hammond of Boston was among activists who huddled yesterday with President Obama, members of Congress, and his special envoy to Sudan, General Scott Gration, ahead of Gration's first trip to the war-torn nation.

Hammond, a retired pediatrician, has been focusing on the humanitarian crisis in Darfur, which the US State Department has declared a genocide. She is board chairman for the Save Darfur Coalition, whose president, Jerry Fowler, also attended the meeting.

Afterward, Obama said the Sudan crisis is worsening and he hopes Gration can persuade President Omar al-Bashir's government to allow aid groups back in the country to "avert an enormous humanitarian crisis."

"Even as we're dealing with that immediate issue, we can't take our eyes off the longstanding conflicts in Sudan that have resulted in all of these persons being displaced," Obama said.

Fowler said his coalition was "reassured" of Obama's commitment on the issue and said that Gration must tell Sudanese officials that they now face a "fundamental choice."

"They must choose between continuing policies which have thrown the lives of millions of Sudanese civilians on the fire and have placed Sudan on a path toward greater international isolation, or reversing those policies and reconciling with an international community whose support for Bashir, and thus for Sudan, will only grow weaker as time passes," Fowler said in a statement.

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Opening a field hearing on Mexican drug violence, Senator John F. Kerry called yesterday for reinstituting a ban on the importation of assault-style weapons and criticized calls for sending the National Guard to the southwest border as "premature and possibly counterproductive."

The assault weapon ban, passed under President Clinton in 1994, was taken off the books under President Bush in 2004. Law enforcement officials say that the vast majority of the high-powered guns used by Mexican drug cartels come from north of the border.

In his opening statement at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing in El Paso, Kerry also voiced support for the plan that the Obama administration announced last week to send more resources to the border, and voiced support for the Mexican government.

"I commend President Felipe Calderon for his courage and determination in challenging the cartels. He and the Mexican people must know that we stand beside them in this fight, not that we've written him off."

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