Minutes after he told voters at a Reno, Nevada, rally that his opponents were trying to “run [him] down,” Senator Barack Obama held a media availability today to declare truce with his main competitors - Senators Clinton and Edwards. But mainly Senator Clinton.

“I wanted to take the time to talk to all of you a little bit because I’ve been a little concerned about the tenor the campaign has been going over the last couple of days,” Obama said to a roomful of reporters. “I thought it would be useful for me to just air this out a little bit,” he continued.

“I think over the last couple days you’ve seen a tone on the Democratic side in the campaign that I think is unfortunate,” he stated. “I may disagree with Senator Clinton or Senator Edwards on how to get there, but we share the same goals. We’re all Democrats.” He praised Edwards and Clinton as “patriots” who have the best interests of the country at heart, but urged all campaigns to “focus on the work that needs to get done” during this important time in our history. “I don’t want the campaign at this stage to degenerate into so much tit for tat back and forth that we lose sight of why we are all doing this,” he said.

This unscheduled announcement came just one day after Senator Clinton accused Senator Obama of trying to distort her comments on Martin Luther King, Jr., and challenged the consistency of his position on the war in Iraq. And, lest we forget, one day after BET founder and Clinton supporter, Bob Johnson, insinuated (and later denied) that while Clintons were deeply involved in “black issues”, Barack Obama was doing drugs. [His exact quote per FOX News' Aaron Bruns was, "I am frankly insulted that the Obama campaign would imply that we are so stupid that we would think Hillary and Bill Clinton, who have been deeply and emotionally involved in black issues when Barack Obama was doing something in the neighborhood that I won’t say what he was doing that he said it in his book."]

Senator Obama took questions from six reporters - Time’s Mark Halperin asked if Senator Obama would change his rhetoric about the Clintons and Nedra Pickler from the Associated Press questioned Obama on whether he thought the Clintons had been racially insensitive in light of recent comments Senator Clinton made about Martin Luther King, Jr., and those of her husband calling the Obama campaign a “fairy tale.”

Watch Obama’s opening statement and his response to those two questions here: