Another week, another crucial set of primaries

INDIANAPOLIS — "I'm a pressure player," Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama boasted during a basketball game here this weekend.

But if Obama is feeling pressure to win Tuesday's primary in the Hoosier state, so is Hillary Clinton, his chief rival for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination.

An Obama sweep of Indiana and North Carolina, which also votes Tuesday, could be the evidence party leaders are looking for – that the Illinois senator can close the deal, especially with the white working class voters who have drifted away from him since his last significant primary win on Feb. 19 in Wisconsin.

But on Monday, as the two rivals darted back and forth between Indiana and North Carolina, both predicted their rivalry would survive Tuesday's voting.

On NBC's "Today" show, Obama said the party "will be in a position to make a decision who the Democratic nominee is going to be" after the final contests on June 3 in Montana and South Dakota.

"I will be the Democratic nominee," he added.

Clinton, appearing on CNN's "American Morning," gave no indication of ending her quest for the party's nomination even though the New York senator trails Obama in convention delegates and will most likely do so on June 3 as well.

"I think we've closed the gap," she said.

Even if she loses both primaries Tuesday, "she will continue her campaign no matter what," said Kenneth Sherrill, an elections expert at Hunter College.

A total of 187 delegates to the party's August nominating convention are at stake Tuesday, the biggest prizes remaining in the state-by-state Democratic race. Obama leads in polls in North Carolina, but Indiana is very close, with most polls giving Clinton a slight edge.

Although Indiana's demographics generally favor Clinton, the northwest portion of the state is served by the Chicago media, and Obama is a familiar figure there. Also, the state has experienced a surge in new voters, which, with few exceptions, have favored Obama in past contests.

Only six contests remain after Tuesday, but the next stop, May 13 in West Virginia, does not bode well for Obama. A Rasmussen survey there shows Obama trailing Clinton 56-27 percent, with more than half the Democrats in the state saying they believe Obama shares some of the "controversial" views of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Obama leads Clinton in the race for the 2,025 delegates needed to win the nomination, but he has faltered in recent weeks as a result of his past association with Wright, even though he has denounced the minister's more controversial views, namely that the United States invited the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and that the U.S. government could have been behind the spread of AIDS in urban areas.

The Democratic presidential campaign, which began with big themes of war and peace, has in the last few days become an argument between Obama and Clinton over the wisdom of suspending the federal gas tax this summer as a way to provide Americans temporarily relief from $4-a-gallon gas pump prices.

And on the final day of campaigning before Tuesday's voting, that argument was front and center as Obama and Clinton both courted the kind of working class voters who provided the winning edge to Clinton in the Pennsylvania and Ohio primaries earlier.

"Senator Obama doesn't want to do anything," Clinton said in touting her proposal for a summer-long suspension of the gasoline tax at a rally at a community college in Greenville, N.C. "You don't hire a president to make speeches. You hire a president to solve problems."

But Obama, in a campaign event in Evansville, Ind., said the proposal to suspend the 18.4 cents-a-gallon gas tax from Memorial Day to Labor Day would provide little in actual savings to motorists.

"It's a stunt. It's what Washington does," he said.

A group of 230 economists, including four Nobel Prize winners and advisers to presidents from both parties, released a letter Monday agreeing with Obama. Among other things, the letter said, such a tax holiday would add to the federal budget deficit and generate major profits for oil companies rather than significantly lowering prices for consumers.

Arizona Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, has offered a similar holiday gas tax proposal.