US:It was shaping up to be Fight Night in Vegas but a last-minute truce between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama ensured that Tuesday night's Democratic candidates' debate was about as aggressive as an evening with Celine Dion at Caesar's Palace.
Mrs Clinton, Mr Obama and John Edwards are in a tight race ahead of Saturday's caucuses in Nevada, with polls suggesting any of the three could win. They looked like the best of friends during the debate, however, smiling, sharing jokes and smothering one another with compliments.
Mrs Clinton set the tone when she was asked at the start of the debate about the bitter battle of words over race in recent days between her campaign and Mr Obama's, noting that it was Dr Martin Luther King's birthday.
"The three of us are here in large measure because his dreams have been realised," she said.
"John, who is, as we know, the son of a millworker and really has become an extraordinary success, as Senator Obama who has such an inspirational and profound story to tell America and the world; I, as a woman, who is also a beneficiary of the civil rights movement and the women's movement and the human rights movement, and the Democratic Party has always been in the forefront of that."
She blamed "exuberant and sometimes uncontrollable supporters" of each candidate for the harshest accusations that shot between the campaigns over the past week - an explanation Mr Obama was quick to accept.
"What I am absolutely convinced of is that everybody here is committed to racial equality - has been historically. And what I also expect is that I'm going to be judged as a candidate in terms of how I'm going to be improving the lives of the people in Nevada and the people all across the country," he said.
Mr Obama and Mrs Clinton called a halt to the mutual recriminations over race when it became clear that the row was damaging both candidates and could hamper the Democratic nominee's prospects in November's general election. As the debate in Las Vegas went on, their tone remained friendly, so that when Mrs Clinton was invited to put a question to Mr Obama, she asked him nicely if he would co-sponsor a Bill to prevent President George Bush tying his successor's hands on Iraq.
The most important exchange came when the candidates were asked to identify their greatest weaknesses. Mr Edwards said he could be guilty of being too caring, Mrs Clinton said she was sometimes impatient with the slow pace of progress but Mr Obama admitted to a real, human failing, saying he was disorganised and kept an untidy desk.
Mrs Clinton seized on the confession, linking it to an interview earlier in the week when Mr Obama said he did not plan to act as chief operating officer if he became president but would hire the best people and leave them to run the bureaucracy. "You've got to pick good people, certainly, but you have to hold them accountable every single day. We've seen the results of a president who, frankly, failed at that. You know, he went into office saying he was going to have the kind of Harvard Business School CEO model where he'd set the tone, he'd set the goals and then everybody else would have to implement it. And we saw the failures," she said.
"So I do think you have to do both. It's a really hard job, and in America we put the head of state and the head of government together in one person."