CHICAGO (AP) – Democrat Barack Obama expressed frustration Wednesday that racial issues keep rising to the top of his presidential battle with Hillary Rodham Clinton, but he said the great majority of voters will base their decisions on substantive issues.

At a news conference, Obama said he feels his primary victories in an array of states have proven he can draw support from all races and regions, and that he is not overly reliant on black voters.

“We keep on thinking we’ve dispelled this,” he said. “And it keeps on getting raised once again.”

He said critics suggest “maybe he hasn’t proven that he can win white, blue-collar workers.”

“And we won that in Virginia, and we won it in Wisconsin,” he said.

In each new primary, he said, “we seem to have to prove this stuff all over.” Given his wins, he said, “at this point, we should have put to rest this notion that somehow I am a candidate that’s just focused on one demographic.”

In handily winning Tuesday’s Mississippi primary, Obama took about 90 percent of the black vote and 30 percent of the white vote, according to exit polls. Similar results in other Deep South states have raised questions of whether Obama’s strong black support is nudging some white Democrats into Clinton’s column.

Obama said he did not think Clinton’s campaign was deliberately stirring racial divisions.

But he said her campaign “has talked more during the course of the last few months about what groups are supporting her and what groups are supporting me, and trying to make the case that the reason she should be the nominee is there are a set of voters that Obama might not get. That seems to track certain racial demographics. And I disagree with that.”

Obama opened the event flanked by nine retired military officers who said he is fully capable of being commander in chief, a response to Clinton’s suggestions that he is unready and untested.

Retired Air Force Gen. Merrill McPeak praised Obama for opposing a “dumb war” in Iraq. He said Obama has the steady temperament a leader needs, and called him “No-Shock Barack, No-Drama Obama.”

Obama responded to a former adviser’s recent suggestion that he might withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq more slowly than he has promised, because of military considerations in Iraq.

He said he would summon his top military officers “and the entire national security apparatus, and give them a commission, which is that we are going to withdraw from Iraq. And we’re going to be as careful getting out as we were careless getting in.”

“I will listen very carefully to them in terms of the pace, the intelligence, the tactics of withdrawal,” Obama said. “But I will not equivocate on my strategic point that we need to withdraw as deliberately and as responsibly as we can.”

He said one or two combat brigades could be withdrawn each month.

Obama said some voters might favor or disfavor him because he is black, just as some might favor or disfavor Clinton because she is female.

However, he said, “the overwhelming majority of Americans are going to make these decisions based on who they think will be the best president. I have absolute confidence that if I’m doing my job, if I’m delivering my message, then there are very few voters out there that I can’t win.”

“If I’m not winning them over,” he said, “then it’s my fault.”

On another racially tinged issue, Obama said recent comments by Clinton fundraiser Geraldine Ferraro about his candidacy were ridiculous, but not racist.

Ferraro, the party’s vice presidential nominee in 1984, on Wednesday stepped down from the honorary post she held in Clinton’s campaign amid the backlash caused by her remarks.

Ferraro told the Daily Breeze newspaper in Torrance, Calif.: “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is.”

Asked if the remarks were racist, Obama said, “I don’t think she intended them that way.” But he called them “ridiculous” and “wrong-headed.”

“The notion that it is a great advantage to me to be an African American named Barack Obama and pursue the presidency, I think, is not a view that has been commonly shared by the general public,” he said.

At the 45-minute session with reporters at the Chicago Museum of History, the Illinois senator couched his criticisms of Clinton in fairly gentle terms.

He mocked her suggestion that he cannot win large states that will be key battlegrounds in November. He noted he won the Democratic primaries in Wisconsin, Missouri, Colorado, Iowa and Virginia, all of which should be fiercely contested this fall against Republican John McCain.

As for Clinton’s victories in California and New York, Obama said, any Democratic nominee, including himself, should win those states handily.

Obama opened the event flanked by nine retired military officers who said he is fully capable of being commander in chief, a response to Clinton’s suggestions that he is unready and untested.

Retired Air Force Gen. Tony McPeak praised Obama for opposing a “dumb war” in Iraq. He said Obama has the steady temperament a leader needs, and called him “No-Shock Barack, No-Drama Obama.”

Obama responded to a former adviser’s recent suggestion that he might withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq more slowly than he has promised, because of military considerations in Iraq. He said he would summon his top military officers “and the entire national security apparatus, and give them a commission, which is that we are going to withdraw from Iraq. And we’re going to be as careful getting out as we were careless getting in.”

“I will listen very carefully to them in terms of the pace, the intelligence, the tactics of withdrawal,” Obama said. “But I will not equivocate on my strategic point that we need to withdraw as deliberately and as responsibly as we can.”

He said one or two combat brigades could be withdrawn each month.

AP-ES-03-12-08 1808EDT

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