Young Democrats a primary interest

Clinton, Obama stand-ins keep the fight going; Edwards still on the fence

DURHAM -- Rejecting calls for an early end to the Democratic presidential race, surrogates for U.S. Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton said both candidates should continue their fight to North Carolina.

At a Young Democrat convention in Research Triangle Park, Newark Mayor Cory Booker, one of the party's rising stars, said Obama essentially has won the primary race because of his lead in delegates, but he stopped short of saying Clinton should drop out.

"North Carolina is a perfect place to add an exclamation point onto a sentence that I think has already been written," he told reporters.

Political commentator James Carville, a supporter of Clinton's campaign, said at the same event that he has heard from Democratic voters that they want the race to continue at least until the state's May 6 primary so that their voices can be heard.

"What's so awful about having a primary here in North Carolina?" he said.

The comments came a day after Sens. Chris Dodd of Connecticut and Patrick Leahy of Vermont, both prominent Democrats, called for Clinton to end her campaign. Clinton and Obama said Saturday they did not agree with that sentiment.

The ongoing Democratic nomination fight brought new interest to the annual daylong convention of activists ages 18 to 35. Nearly 600 Democrats, a high in recent years, and a host of party candidates for statewide office came to the Sheraton Imperial Hotel for the event.

Edwards is still coy

Though workshops and speeches focused on party building and other issues, the contest between Clinton and Obama was never far from center stage.

In his first major speech since dropping out of the presidential race in January, former U.S. Sen. John Edwards was neutral, offering praise for Obama's ability to inspire new voters and Clinton's political experience.

"I have a very high opinion of both of them," he said. "We would be blessed as a nation to have either one of them as president."

Asked later whether he would endorse a candidate, he declined.

Obama's proxy

Mirroring the different approaches of the two Democratic presidential campaigns, the official surrogates for Clinton and Obama wooed the crowd in strikingly different ways in separate speeches.

Booker, whose father attended N.C. Central University in Durham, used soaring rhetoric to link his experiences fighting apathy about crime in inner-city Newark to Obama's message of change.

He recalled a longtime housing project resident who scolded him when he said her neighborhood was full of graffiti and drug dealers.

"She said, 'Boy, you need to learn ... that the world you see outside is a reflection of what you have inside of you. If you're one of those people who only sees problems and darkness and despair, that's all there's ever going to be,'" Booker said.

He said he wanted to inspire the audience the way that Obama would have if he'd been present, rather than rattle off facts about his candidate.

"He's got great policy, but heck, so does Hillary Clinton," Booker said. "I'm supporting Barack Obama because he ... can transform at the national level, at the international level, who our nation is."

Chelsea on the job

Chelsea Clinton, meantime, skipped making a speech in favor of a highly detailed discussion of her mother's policies, taking questions from the audience for more than an hour on topics such as health insurance and college tuition.

She said Clinton would renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, the landmark 1994 pact with Canada and Mexico that some blame for the loss of manufacturing jobs in North Carolina.

At one point, a member of the audience asked how Hillary Clinton could reconcile her views on NAFTA with those of her husband, who signed the agreement.

"We don't agree on everything as a family," she responded. "My mother and father agree on most things -- not everything."

On a more personal level, she said her mother's campaign made her more aware of sexism.

"I really didn't get how much sexism there was in this country until I was at a rally in New Hampshire and someone came up to me and said 'I just can't see a woman being commander in chief,' " she said.

She said another woman told her that Hillary Clinton was "a little too smart."