"Shame on you," Clinton tells Obama

By Claudia Parsons

CINCINNATI (Reuters) - Hillary Clinton slammed rival Barack Obama on Saturday for campaign leaflets on her health-care plan that she called "blatantly false" and accused him of using Republican tactics in their contest for the Democratic U.S. presidential nomination.

In a bitter exchange, Obama defended the leaflet as accurate and campaign spokesman Bill Burton decried Clinton's "negative campaign."

"Shame on you, Barack Obama," Clinton said, speaking to reporters after a rally in Ohio, a state that is key to her struggling campaign.

Brandishing a copy of the leaflet, Clinton said the Obama campaign was spreading "false, misleading, discredited information" about her health-care plan.

"Senator Obama knows it is not true that my plan forces people to buy insurance even if they can't afford it," Clinton said. "It is blatantly false and yet he continues to spend millions of dollars perpetuating falsehoods. It is not hopeful. It is destructive, particularly for a Democrat to be discrediting universal health care."

Obama said the content of the leaflet was correct. He said he was puzzled by the sudden "change in tone" by his rival because the leaflets Clinton referred to were sent out days or weeks ago. He suggested there was something "tactical" about her attacks now.

"The notion that somehow we're engaging in nefarious tactics I think is pretty hard to swallow," he told reporters. "There's nothing in there that's factually inaccurate."

MARCH 4 CONTESTS