See minute-by-minute coverage of how the debate unfolded at Deadline USA.
Democratic candidates put a halt to some of the bickering that has plagued the campaign over the past week at their final debate before the Nevada caucuses on Saturday, with both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton blaming their staffs for a series of jibes and accusations aimed at each other’s camps.
With four days of campaigning before the first test of voters’ will in the west, polling in the state shows the three leading candidates, senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and former senator John Edwards separated by just six percentage points.
The Obama camp was boosted by an editorial in the Las Vegas Review Journal recommending his candidacy. The nod follows an earlier endorsement from the largest and most influential union in the city, the Culinary Workers Union. That union is dominated by Latino members, a voting group many expect to flex their muscle in the state.
The issue of race and how it has consumed the campaign dominated the early exchanges of Tuesday night’s debate, with all three candidates invited by the moderators to pull back from the sometimes testy and ill-tempered language of the past week.
"We are all family in the Democratic party," Clinton said. "We both have exuberant and sometimes uncontrollable supporters … we need to get this campaign where it should be."
Asked if in hindsight he regretted pushing race in the campaign in recent days, Obama replied, "not only in hindsight, but going forward".
He agreed with Clinton that the problem lay with the sometimes unbridled enthusiasm of campaign staffers. "Our supporters, our staff get overzealous," he said. "They start saying things that I would not say."
The ability to keep control of an organization also provided one of the evening’s more revealing moments, as Obama elaborated on comments he made in an interview earlier in the week when he had been asked if would be a suitable chief operating officer as president.
Obama responded that his strength was vision and bringing people together – qualities lacking with the current president, he noted.
"Being president is not making sure that schedules are being run properly or the paperwork is being shuffled effectively," he said. To laughter, he added: "My desk and my office doesn’t look good. I’ve got to have somebody around me who is keeping track of that stuff."
Clinton picked him up on the point, arguing that, "being president is the chief executive officer … you have to be able to manage and run the bureaucracy".
The three candidates – the field was reduced to three after Ohio representative Dennis Kucinich failed in a legal bid to be allowed to take part – sat around a table for the two-hour debate. Energy and the economy both received generous consideration, with the economy likely to be an important issue for caucus-goers in the state, where home repossessions are among the highest in the country. The proposed siting of a nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain near Las Vegas has also pushed energy high on the list of voters’ priorities.
The Review Journal’s endorsement of Obama was revealed after the debate. But rather than an enthusiastic cry support for the candidate, it was more of a rejection of a return to the Clinton years.
Do Democrats, asked the paper: "really want to spend two months later this year watching a re-run of the horror movie It Came From Little Rock, with the sound turned up much too loud?"
Noting that there were "dozens of issues that Americans happily dismissed as ‘water under the bridge’ as the Clinton era came to a close, but which would quickly ensnare Senator Clinton" the paper also questioned her claim to experience, describing the candidate as "a witness and enabler during her husband’s presidential terms".
Of Obama, the paper dismissed his claim to represent change, noting that his policy proposals were "old-line, welfare-state solutions".
It did, however, admit some of his strengths, saying: "Barack Obama is, at least, likable. He is a good enough orator that there is no need to cringe when he dares to speak off the cuff."
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