WASHINGTON – Democrat Barack Obama said Thursday that Wednesday night’s contentious debate, where he was peppered with questions about his words and associations, was a preview of Republican tactics against him in the fall election.

“That was the rollout of the Republican campaign in November,” he said at a town hall meeting in Raleigh, N.C. “They will try to focus on these issues that don’t have anything to do with how you’re paying your bills at the end of the month.” Saying that he has shown “some restraint” in running against a rival Democrat, the Illinois senator said, “If the Republicans come at me, I will come right back at them. . . . I won’t have as much restraint with the Republicans.”

At the town hall meeting, Obama said that New York Sen. Hillary Clinton “looked in her element, taking every opportunity to get a dig in there.” Calling her campaign “a textbook Washington game,” Obama said, “That’s her right, to kind of twist the knife in a little bit.”

Clinton did not explicitly mention Obama or the debate’s fireworks at a forum with several hundred students and others at Haverford College in Pennsylvania.

The New York senator, who appeared with her daughter and mother, focused on her proposals to expand federal support for expanded family leave, broader pre-school and tax credits for Americans who care for their parents. “We need to look more broadly at how we can help families,” Clinton said.

Meanwhile on Thursday, Clinton’s campaign denied that she had referred disparagingly to blue-collar workers after they voted Republican in the 1994 congressional elections, which gave the GOP control of Congress.

The allegation, which surfaced Wednesday on the Huffington Post, is that at a Camp David retreat in January 1995, then-first lady Clinton told her husband to abandon Southern working-class voters who had deserted his party at the polls.

“Screw ’em,” she said, according to several witnesses. “You don’t owe them a thing, Bill. They’ve done nothing for you. You don’t have to do anything for them.”

Thursday her campaign denied the charge.