Obama Falters Over Illegal Immigrants

WASHINGTON — Senator Obama, who has presented himself as the top alternative to Senator Clinton in the Democratic presidential primary race, had problems with a debate question on the same topic Mrs. Clinton flubbed in their party's last debate: illegal immigration.

In response to a question on whether he would support giving driver's licenses to undocumented workers, Mr. Obama started off by saying, "When I was a state senator in Illinois, I voted to require that illegal aliens get trained, get a license, get insurance to protect public safety. That was my intention."

He went on to make a joke that undocumented workers don't come to America to drive, prompting laughter from the audience.

But the moderator, CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer, asked Mr. Obama again what his position was on driver's licenses for the undocumented. The Illinois senator responded: "I am not proposing that that's what we do." He then went on to say, "I have already said I support the notion that we have to deal with public safety."

That answer prompted Mr. Blitzer to remark: "This is the sort of question available to a yes or no answer."

The exchange may have been sweet for Mrs. Clinton, who has seen her poll numbers slip in the last two weeks as her two chief rivals, Mr. Obama and a former North Carolina senator, John Edwards, have accused her of flip-flopping. Indeed, Mr. Obama referenced Mrs. Clinton's answer on the drivers' licenses in his opening remarks. "We saw in the last debate that it took not just that debate, but two more weeks before we could a clear answer, in terms of where her position was."

Last night, Mrs. Clinton responded to the drivers' license question with one word: "no."

Mrs. Clinton's performance in the last debate has hurt her in the polls. On Monday, CBS News released a poll showing that she and her two chief rivals are nearly deadlocked in Iowa, the first caucus in the nation — and widely seen as a must-win state for Messrs. Obama and Edwards.

Since their last debate, Messrs. Edwards and Obama have gone on the attack against Mrs. Clinton who they portray as disingenuous and out of touch with the base of the party from her perch in Washington.

The former first lady has played a variation of her "politics of personal destruction" line from the late 1990s, portraying her primary challengers as piling on and attacking her because she is a woman. Last week, her husband, President Clinton, compared the attacks on his wife to the swift boat veterans who questioned Senator Kerry's recollection of his experience in Vietnam in the 2004 presidential campaign.

Last night, she went on the attack, turning the barbs of her antagonists against them. She said at the beginning of the debate that her pants suit was "asbestos." When Mr. Edwards accused her of voting with President Bush, Vice President Cheney. and "the neocons" on a recent Senate resolution asking the White House to designate Iran's Quds Force as a terrorist organization, Mrs. Clinton said: "I don't mind taking hits on my record on issues, but when somebody starts throwing mud, at least we can hope that it's both accurate and not right out of the Republican playbook."

Indeed, Mrs. Clinton accused Mr. Edwards — who has accused her of playing the "politics of parsing" and called her a flip-flopper — of flip-flopping by not supporting universal health care when he ran for president in 2004.

In an answer to a question about whether she was being attacked because she was a woman, she said, "I am not exploiting anything at all. I am not playing the gender card here in Las Vegas, I am playing a winning card. People are not attacking me because I am a woman, they are attacking me because I am ahead."

While Mrs. Clinton handled the immigration question with more brevity than her opponents, among Democratic voters her position on Iran may get her into more trouble. In the second half of last night's debate, an Iraq war veteran and his mother asked a question based on their concern that President Bush is preparing to send ground troops to the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Senator Biden, a Democrat of Delaware who is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he would work to impeach Mr. Bush if the president started a war against Iran without getting authorization. Mr. Obama pointed out that the resolution for which Mrs. Clinton voted in September would require American soldiers in Iraq to prepare to counter Iranian influence in the country.

Mrs. Clinton defended her vote, saying it would not authorize the war, as her rivals insisted. But she also said she favors direct negotiations with the Iranians regardless of whether they suspend their quest for nuclear weapons. She summed up her position by saying: "Oppose the rush to war, but get tough on Iran." She also told the soldier who asked the question that he would know that Iran's revolutionary guard and Quds Force were supporting terrorist militias.

The tension between the top two Democrats was palpable in the debate. At one point, Mr. Obama said Mrs. Clinton's proposal on taxes sounded like "something I would expect from Mitt Romney or Rudy Giuliani." The crowd booed. Mrs. Clinton smirked.