can quickly get over the gender issue with Clinton - because she is white."

McClain added that Obama is running "a very good campaign" on a platform of multiracial and multicultural coalition-building, but in the end "there is a question about how many Latinos will go into a voting booth and pull a lever for a black."

From the first few contests it's clear that Obama is picking up his support from the better-off and the young, who like his moderate style. But he also has to capture the support of millions of blue-collar working people - many of them Hispanic - and thus far he has not registered any decisive impact.

Mrs Clinton, by contrast, has successfully recruited labour icon Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farmworkers, and also Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a national chair for the Hillary Clinton campaign.

There is a way Obama could make an impact on these millions of Hispanics he has thus far failed to set on fire, but it would ratchet up the animus between the Obama and Clinton campaigns to a

new and acrid intensity.

Across the next crucial days he could declare bluntly that while Mrs Clinton may profess profound sympathy for the concerns of Hispanics, the substantive record of the Clinton presidency was terrible.

The Free Trade bill ratified by Bill Clinton in 1994 sent hundreds of thousands of Mexicans north across the border out of Mexico's reeling economy, there to be met by criminal sanctions - aimed at the poor generally - harsher on Clinton's watch than on Bush's. It was Senator Obama, not Senator Clinton, who was a co-sponsor of the Immigrant Reform Bill, a major issue of 2007 for the Latino population.

Obama is learning that to stay in the game with the Clintons he has to play it rougher. He has very little time to escape from the box into which Hillary and Bill have been trying to trap him as the black candidate Hispanics should not trust.