BARACK OBAMA has rejected Hillary Clinton's call for a debate before next week's primaries in Indiana and North Carolina and predicted that Democrats will unite behind him if he becomes the party's presidential nominee.
Trailing among pledged delegates and in national polls, Mrs Clinton wants to meet her rival in a series of 90-minute, free-form debates based on those between Abraham Lincoln and Democrat Stephen Douglas in 1858.
However, in an interview with Fox News yesterday, Mr Obama said that the Democratic candidates had already debated 21 times and further encounters would shed little light on what distinguished them.
"For two weeks, two big states, we want to make sure we're talking to as many voters on the ground, taking questions from voters," he said. "We're not going to have debates between now and Indiana."
He enjoys a 15-point lead in North Carolina, but he is in a statistical dead-heat with Mrs Clinton in Indiana, where the white, blue-collar workers that backed her in Pennsylvania last week are an important part of the electorate.
Mr Obama has fared badly among white, working-class voters since mid-February, when he won 11 successive victories and appeared to be broadening his appeal beyond African-Americans, the young and the highly-educated. Since then, Mrs Clinton has won more white voters in every contest and in Pennsylvania, Catholics supported her by a margin of 70 per cent to 30 per cent.
Mr Obama dismissed the suggestion that he had alienated conservative, white Democrats by describing small-town Americans as bitter, and predicted that they would support him against Republican John McCain in November.
"I am confident that when you come to a general election, and we are having a debate about the future of this country - how are we going to lower gas prices, how are we going to deal with job losses, how are we going to focus on energy independence - that those are voters who I will be able to appeal to," he said.
Mr Obama said that, despite controversy over remarks about racial divisions by his former pastor Jeremiah Wright, race would not be a major issue in the general election.
"Is race still a factor in our society? Yes. I don't think anybody would deny that. Is that going to be the determining factor in a general election? No, because I'm absolutely confident that the American people - what they're looking for is somebody who can solve their problems," he said.
"If I lose, it won't be because of race. It will be because . . . I made mistakes on the campaign trail, I wasn't communicating effectively my plans in terms of helping them in their everyday lives."
Mr Obama used the interview to stress his credentials as a non-ideological politician who can reach across to conservatives, praising the Republican approach to economic policies such as business regulation. "I think that back in the '60s and '70s, a lot of the way we regulated industry was top down command and control. We're going to tell businesses exactly how to do things," he said.
"And I think that the Republican Party and people who thought about the margins came with the notion that you know what, if you simply set some guidelines, some rules and incentives for businesses, let them figure out how they're going to for example reduce pollution. And a cap and trade system, for example, is a smarter way of doing it, controlling pollution, than dictating every single rule that a company has to abide by, which creates a lot of bureaucracy and red tape and oftentimes is less efficient."