Obama looks to clinch nomination with Indiana win

INDIANAPOLIS — Sandwiched between Ohio and Illinois, Indiana claims to be "the crossroads of America." It could be that and more on Tuesday when the Hoosier State hosts the latest – and perhaps final – contest between Democratic presidential rivals Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

North Carolina also votes Tuesday, but it is Indiana that is the most competitive of the two states and the one most likely to cast the more important verdict, especially on the lingering question on whether Obama can win the kind of white, rural blue-collar voters he has lost to Clinton in states like Ohio and Pennsylvania.

If Obama wins here, experts contend, he could all but clinch the nomination by silencing the critics who suggest he cannot hold the so-called Reagan Democrat voters who have sided with the Republican Party in general elections. He already leads in convention delegates and the popular vote.

If Clinton wins, they further contend, the Democratic contest will continue on to its June 3 scheduled conclusion with neither candidate claiming enough regular delegates to win the nomination, forcing the party's superdelegates to determine who will be the party's nominee against presumptive Republican nominee John McCain.

"The Democrats could have a nominee after Tuesday," said Bert Rockman, political science professor at Purdue University. "Or not," he added.

For Indiana to be the "tie-breaker," as former Bill Clinton adviser James Carville suggests, is an odd turn of events in presidential politics.

Indiana hasn't played a role in Democratic presidential primaries since 1984, when the state gave upstart Gary Hart an upset victory against Walter Mondale, the eventual nominee. And in general elections, Indiana hasn't really been in play since Harry Truman's "Give 'em hell" whistle-stop train tour came through the state in 1948.

But in 2006, Republicans took a pounding in congressional races. They now control only four of the state's nine seats. In 2006, they held seven. Even Murray Clark, Indiana's Republican Party chairman, admits the state has a "grumpy electorate."

Indeed, Indiana has lost about 98,000 manufacturing jobs since 2000, one of the reasons why Obama and Clinton have mostly debated economic issues in their campaigns in the state.

But since mid-March, Obama and Clinton have been almost a constant presence in Indiana, resulting in several memorable moments in presidential politics, like Clinton tossing back beer and whiskey shots in Crown Point and Obama displaying his basketball skills in Hammond, one of the many hoop-crazed small towns in Indiana.

The Sunday tracking poll by independent pollster John Zogby showed a very tight race in the final 48 hours of the contest in Indiana. Zogby had Clinton at 41 percent and Obama at 43 percent, a jump of 2 percentage points from the day before.

Recent polling indicated Obama is cruising toward victory in North Carolina. Zogby's most recent tracking poll showed him at 48 percent and Clinton at 39 percent.

Results from previous primaries indicate Obama should benefit from North Carolina's significant black population. The state will be the last Democratic primary in a state with a black population above the national average. The state's population is 21.4 percent black. The nation is 12.4 percent black.

Even so, Obama faces a challenge in North Carolina similar to that in Indiana: "to show, at least to the party's superdelegates, that he can win white rural working class voters," said Ferrel Guillory, director of a Southern politics program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Both candidates have been shuttling back and forth between Indiana and North Carolina in recent days, and Clinton got a boost in the Tar Heel State with the endorsement of Gov. Mike Easley.

"It's going to take somebody very special, very smart, somebody who understands, somebody who has experience to get in there and turn it around immediately, and she can do that," Easley said in endorsing Clinton and citing the nation's current woes.

He also indirectly chided Obama's message of hope.

"There's a lot of 'yes we can' and 'yes we should' going around," Easley said in announcing his support for Clinton. "Hillary Clinton is ready to deliver, that's the difference. She's ready to deliver today, immediately."

But Obama, in both Indiana and North Carolina, has attracted hundreds of thousands of new voters to Tuesday's primaries – the key, he maintains, to making such reliably Republican states more competitive in the fall general election. "We expand the playing field," he says.

In Indiana, there are about 400,000 new voters registered since 2006. In North Carolina, 165,449 new voters have registered since January.