North Carolina in play?

Jeff Zeleny and Jodi Kantor:

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Many voters in the state were just beginning to turn their attention to the Democratic primary at the very moment Mr. Obama’s glow was dimming. Tuning in to their televisions, they saw a candidate who bristled his way through a debate last month in Pennsylvania and, more recently, an incessant repetition of incendiary statements by his longtime pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., with whom Mr. Obama has now broken.

“Obviously, we’ve had to fight through over the last week an awful lot of noise — that’s just a fact,” Mr. Obama told reporters. He added: “I think the American voters don’t want a whole bunch of drama. What they’re looking for is, ‘Can you solve my problems?’ ”

Advisers to Mr. Obama concede he lost support among some white voters in the wake of the storm surrounding Mr. Wright. Since then, the campaign has sought to increase its appeal to white voters. At Mr. Obama’s first stop in the state on Friday, a rally in Charlotte, most seats in the Cricket Arena were filled with black supporters. Yet many of the seats directly behind Mr. Obama — in the view of news cameras — were filled by white supporters.

Jerry Meek, chairman of the state Democratic Party, credits the tightening in the race to the Wright contretemps as well as the Clinton family’s three-way march across North Carolina.

“They’ve reached out to groups of people who are not used to being reached out to by presidential candidates,” said Mr. Meek, who is remaining neutral in the race.

Independent voters can participate in the primary, and Ace Smith, state director for the Clinton campaign, predicted Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama would split those votes evenly. “We were getting destroyed with independents in all those early primaries,” Mr. Smith said Friday.

Still, polling by the Clinton campaign continues to show her clearly trailing Mr. Obama, advisers emphasized, but they were holding out hope of at least narrowing the margin of an Obama victory to less than her margin in the April 22 Pennsylvania primary, which she won by slightly less than 10 percentage points.

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Ace Smith? I like that name. It lends itself to several puns, which I will ignore for now. Suffice it to say that the Clinton's will need several aces to win their hand in North Carolina. Before the latest Rev. Wright meltdown, Obama was ahead by 16. some polls are showing the race tightening and one even showed Clinton winning, but the Real Clear Politic average still shows Obama as the comfortable winner. Hillary Clinton would need a New Hampshire type surprise and North Carolina does not lend itself to cross border same day registrations. But keeping it competitive probably is enough to keep her in the game. At this point that is all she can ask for.