The presidential candidates set their sights on Texas on Monday in a burst of last-minute campaigning before the polls open there and in Ohio, Rhode Island and Vermont on Tuesday morning.
The Democratic race continued to intensify, with the latest opinion surveys showing Senator Barack Obama with a slight edge over Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in Texas, but Mrs. Clinton with a small lead over Mr. Obama in Ohio.
Mrs. Clinton began her day in Ohio, where she said she would make no predictions about Tuesday’s primaries or comment on what the results might mean for her campaign.
“I am not a political pundit,” she said at a brief news conference in Toledo on Monday morning. “I’ll leave that to you all.”
She said that succeeding in the four primaries on Tuesday meant coming in first.
“Winning, that’s my measure of success,” she said. “Winning.”
But she gave no indication that losses would drive her from the race. “I think we’re going to do well tomorrow,” she said. “Then it’s on to Pennsylvania and the states still ahead. I’m just getting warmed up.”
Despite Mrs. Clinton’s upbeat tone, there were signs that her campaign was under stress and was engaged in internal finger-pointing after 11 straight primary and caucus defeats. In an e-mail message sent over the weekend to The Los Angeles Times, Mark Penn, Mrs. Clinton’s chief strategist and pollster, appeared to distance himself from the campaign’s operations.
The Los Angeles Times quoted Mr. Penn as writing in the e-mail that he had “no direct authority in the campaign.” The newspaper also quoted him describing himself as merely “an outside message adviser with no campaign staff reporting to me.”
The e-mail message continued: “I have had no say or involvement in four key areas — the financial budget and resource allocation, political or organizational sides. Those were the responsibility of Patti Solis Doyle, Harold Ickes and Mike Henry, and they met separately on all matters relating to those areas.”
Last month Ms. Doyle stepped down as Mrs. Clinton’s campaign manager and Mr. Henry resigned from the post of deputy campaign manager. Mr. Ickes remains as a senior adviser.
Howard Wolfson, the campaign’s communications chief, responded to Mr. Penn’s e-mail message by telling The Los Angeles Times that it was Mr. Penn who had top responsibility for the campaign’s message, and who ran daily meetings on the topic. Another aide told the newspaper that Mr. Penn spoke to Mrs. Clinton regularly.
In Toledo, Mrs. Clinton used her news conference to press her campaign’s attack on Mr. Obama for its position on the North America Free Trade Agreement, known as Nafta. Both candidates have told voters in Ohio, where the trade treaty is widely blamed for job losses, that they think the treaty is flawed and should be renegotiated.
But the Clinton campaign, citing news reports, has accused Austan Goolsbee, a senior economic adviser to Mr. Obama, of telling Canadian officials that Mr. Obama’s opposition to Nafta is largely a political tactic, not a serious policy position. Canadian television and The Associated Press have reported that Mr. Goolsbee told a Canadian official in Chicago that Mr. Obama’s private position on Nafta was different from his public stance. Mr. Goolsbee and the Obama campaign have responded that his remarks were misinterpreted.
Mrs. Clinton raised the issue on Monday. “I don’t think people should come to Ohio. and you both give speeches that are very critical of Nafta and you send out misleading and false information about my positions regarding Nafta, and then we find out that your chief economic adviser has gone to a foreign government and basically done the old wink-wink, don’t pay any attention, this is just political rhetoric.”
She pressed the point. “I think it raises serious questions about what you expect them to believe about your position,” Mrs. Clinton said.
In response, the Obama campaign accused Mrs. Clinton of using false ammunition in a desperate attempt to try to remain in the race.
