Las Vegas ? In a city known for its impromptu marriages, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama bonded Tuesday night in the name of party harmony after a week of bickering over racial issues, with both blaming overzealous surrogates for their conflict.

“We both have exuberant and sometimes uncontrollable supporters, but we need to get this campaign to where it used to be,” said Clinton, who chided supporter Bob Johnson for raising the issue of Obama’s youthful drug use.

“We are all family,” she added, echoing remarks Obama made on Monday.

Obama’s supporters have accused Clinton and her surrogates of racial insensitivity after she suggested that Martin Luther King, Jr. needed President Johnson to transform his vision of equality into reality. Clinton had accused Obama’s surrogates of “distorting” her record.

But after a week of exchanging bitter, often personal barbs, the two top Democratic contenders were in a penitential mood, like a pair of contrite Vegas revelers after a binge on The Strip.

By contrast, John Edwards turned on Obama, whom he had praised as an agent of change during the debate earlier this month in New Hampshire. Edwards, competing with Obama for the party’s mantle of change, attacked the Illinois senator for taking money from drug company employees and criticized him for not pledging to remove all U.S. ground troops from Iraq if he’s elected.

“It is dishonest to suggest that you won’t have troops there to protect the embassy,” Obama replied.

Clinton and Obama did trade fire several times. Obama accused Clinton of raising the “specter of terrorist attack … to score political points,” referring to Clinton’s recent comments that al-Qaida is likely to “test” a newly elected leader.

But the most heated action took place before the three candidates took the stage. An hour before the debate, the Nevada Supreme Court overturned a lower court’s decision forcing MSNBC to permit Dennis Kucinich to appear.

The court ruled that including Kucinich, who garnered only 2 percent of the vote in New Hampshire, would have violated the network’s First Amendment rights.

Back to the racial issue, the fight over those statements came as polls showed an overwhelming majority of black voters abandoning Clinton for Obama – while a substantial majority of white Democrats back Clinton.

All three candidates sought to diffuse those tensions in the first few minutes of the debate.

“All of us, myself, John and Hillary have all been committed to racial equality,” said Obama, who counseled against “falling into the same traps of division” that splintered the country over race in previous elections.