WASHINGTON — The truce declared last night between senators Clinton and Obama over a racial flare-up in the presidential campaign signals that neither candidate wants to eliminate the other as a possible pick for the second spot on the Democratic ticket.

Mrs. Clinton issued a statement last night calling for leading Democratic hopefuls to “seek common ground,” hours after Mr. Obama praised President Clinton and his wife for their records on civil rights.

The statements from both sides were efforts to cool tensions that had escalated amid a series of comments made by Mrs. Clinton and her surrogates that some supporters of Mr. Obama viewed as racially charged. The former first lady was criticized for belittling the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., and Mrs. Clinton in turn lashed out at the Obama campaign for injecting race into the contest.

“Our party and our nation is bigger than this,” Mrs. Clinton said in her statement.

“We differ on a lot of things,” she added. “And it is critical to have the right kind of discussion on where we stand. But when it comes to civil rights and our commitment to diversity, when it comes to our heroes — President John F. Kennedy and Dr. King — Senator Obama and I are on the same side.”

Earlier, Mr. Obama tried himself to end the bickering over race, saying he was “a little concerned about the tenor of the campaign over the last few days.”

“We share the same goals, we are all Democrats, we all believe in civil rights, we all believe in equal rights,” he told reporters in Reno, Nevada, according to Reuters. He added that “Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton have historically and consistently been on the right side of civil rights issues.”

The Illinois senator, however, was not nearly as magnanimous during interviews he gave to the network newscasts last evening. On CBS, he blamed the Clinton campaign by saying the sniping over race was “more back than forth,” adding that it was “a strategy on their part.” On NBC, he said the Clinton camp was trying to drive his campaign “off message.”

A spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, Blake Zeff, said the two candidates did not speak personally yesterday and that the truce was not coordinated by their campaigns. The cease-fire on the issue of race will be tested when the candidates meet for a televised debate tonight in Las Vegas.

The campaigns escalated battles on other fronts yesterday, as surrogates for Mrs. Clinton held two separate conference calls to criticize Mr. Obama. On one call, Clinton aides highlighted his record on abortion rights, saying he had failed to show leadership on the issue by voting “present” instead of “no” on several restrictive measures during his years in the Illinois state Senate. On the other call, campaign officials for Mrs. Clinton castigated the Obama campaign for flyers circulating in Nevada that urge Republicans and independents to become “Democrats for a day” to support him.

The increasingly bitter presidential campaign had threatened to dash the hopes of some party loyalists that the two Democratic front-runners would become running mates in the fall.

To many voters torn between the former first lady and the first-term senator from Illinois, a Clinton-Obama ticket seems the perfect solution to a difficult decision, a combination of two powerhouse and history-making candidates that would energize the Democratic base as never before. The ticket would include one candidate with a Harvard law degree and another with a Yale law degree. But a tight race has brought sharper and more personal attacks between the two camps, including the volleys this week that fanned racial tensions.

The question is whether the charges lobbed in the heat of a political battle will leave permanent damage and preclude Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama from joining forces on a general election ticket.

“It’s hard to imagine now,” a professor of politics at Emory University, Merle Black, said before Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama issued their statements last night. But there is precedent for such a reconciliation. In 1980, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush formed a ticket after Mr. Bush had famously derided Mr. Reagan’s proposals as “voodoo economics” during their Republican primary campaign. And Senators Kerry and Edwards teamed up in 2004 after competing for the Democratic nomination.

Even before this week’s dust-up over race, political analysts and strategists have long viewed the possibility of a Clinton-Obama ticket warily. Either candidate, the argument goes, would look for more geographical balance in a vice presidential pick, or a running mate that could add foreign policy heft. And Mrs. Clinton is seen as having little interest in the second slot if she fails to win the presidential nomination.

“You need a Democrat who brings to the table totally different skills and talents,” a Democratic consultant at the Government Insight Group who advised Michael Dukakis in his bid for president, Michael Goldman, said.

Moreover, some analysts say that nominating a woman and an African American for president and vice president would be asking too much of voters who have elected only white males to national office for more than two centuries. “That would be a real stretch,” one political consultant, Joseph Mercurio, said.

But a variety of developments over the next several months could alter that calculus, which is one reason why Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama are trying to limit their battles now. If neither candidate wins enough delegates to secure the nomination, they may be forced to join with one another to unify the party. Or, Mr. Mercurio speculated, Mrs. Clinton may look to Mr. Obama for his fund-raising ability if the Republicans nominate a candidate not restricted by public financing rules, or if the entry of Mayor Bloomberg as a third-party candidate reshapes the race entirely.