Indiana a 'tie-breaker'? Well...
Posted: Sunday, April 27, 2008 3:21 PM by Domenico Montanaro
From NBC/NJ’s Athena JonesINDIANOPLIS, Ind. --
Obama told reporters Sunday that Indiana was important, but declined to call it a "tie-breaker" as he had before.
"I think that Indiana is a very important state," he said during a roughly five-minute impromptu press conference outside a restaurant he visited after attending church. "So is North Carolina. We don’t take that for granted, so I'm going to be going down there on Monday and Tuesday, but there’s no doubt that Indiana is a state where it's close; it's tied statistically in the polls. We feel very strongly that our message of bringing about change in Washington is something that will resonate with the people here in Indiana."
Since his nearly double-digit loss to
Clinton in Pennsylvania Tuesday, Obama has faced more questions from reporters and pundits about why he can't seem to "close the deal" with voters. Many see wins here in the Hoosier State and in North Carolina on May 6 as key to helping him do that. Polls show a tight race in the former and Obama leading in the latter.
The Illinois senator said he didn't believe the Midwestern values that Indiana, his home state of Illinois, Wisconsin, Missouri and other states represented were "reflected in the debates in Washington" and talked about the need to end political bickering.
He said a win was a win in Indiana and defined a win as 50 plus 1.
Obama declined to answer questions about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright or what it would mean to lose Indiana. When asked to respond to Clinton's latest challenge to a Lincoln-Douglas style debate without a moderator, he repeated his earlier statement that he would not debate before May 6, because he wanted to focus on meeting as many voters as possible in the nine days remaining. He kept open the possibility of considering "something" after those contests, but did not answer directly whether he thought that particular style of debate would be a good idea.
