WASHINGTON, Jan 13: Democratic rivals Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama waged an ill-tempered exchange over race on Sunday as their White House campaigns turned highly acrimonious ahead of key nominating contests.

“The Obama camp is deliberately distorting this,” Clinton protested on NBC television after she made comments that were taken by influential African-Americans as a slight on civil rights champion Martin Luther King.

The former first lady said she had fought her “entire life” for civil rights, and accused the Obama campaign of “such an unfair and unwarranted attempt to misinterpret and mischaracterise me”.

Last Monday Clinton, facing her second defeat in a row to Obama in the New Hampshire primary, sought to emphasise her legislative experience against his popular “change” sloganeering.

“Dr King’s dream began to be realised when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” she said. “It took a president to get it done.” Clinton sensed quickly that she might be misread, and soon afterward reiterated that King was a great hero.

But her remarks were nevertheless perceived by some US blacks as a slur against King and a suggestion that only a white president was able to translate the iconic civil rights leader’s rhetoric into action.

“People were offended at her words and she can explain them however she’d like,” Obama spokesman Bill Burton said in response to Clinton’s remarks on the NBC programme “Meet the Press”. “I think that Congressman Clyburn and other leaders across the country would take great offense at the suggestion that their response was somehow engineered by this campaign,” he said.

James Clyburn, the highest-ranking African-American in Congress and a leading Democratic power-broker in South Carolina, has suggested that he might endorse Obama following Clinton’s remarks a move that could help swing the state in Obama’s favour when it holds its Democratic primary on Jan 26.

“We have to be very, very careful about how we speak about that era in American politics,” Clyburn said of the 1960s, when the battle for equal rights for blacks peaked.

Obama’s ethnic background he is the son of a black Kenyan father and white American mother has always lain in the background of the presidential race.—AFP