Democrats Try To Close Sale With a Week To Go in Iowa
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WASHINGTON — One week before the first presidential votes are cast in a remarkably tight race in Iowa, the candidates are honing their closing arguments as they barnstorm the state for a final time.
On the Democratic side, Senator Clinton is offering an extended version of the case she has made for nearly a year: that she is a candidate “tested” and “ready” to lead the country in challenging times and will produce solutions rather than rhetoric. John Edwards is departing from the Iraq-centered focus that dominated the early months of his campaign, instead emphasizing “kitchen-table” politics shaped around jobs and the economy, as one top adviser wrote in a memo yesterday.
Senator Obama will unveil a revised stump speech today in Des Moines that will outline his final message to Iowans, his campaign said. Previewing the speech in Iowa yesterday, the Illinois senator appeared to target Mrs. Clinton’s claim that she can be the most effective “change agent” as president.
“If they’ve been secretive in the past, they’ll be secretive as president,” he said, according to news reports. “If they haven’t been all that strong on lobbyists in the past,” it “doesn’t matter what they say in the campaign, they won’t be that strong about it when they are president.”
Like Mrs. Clinton has done recently, Mr. Obama also showed a softer side yesterday, offering a hug to a man who broke down in tears at a campaign event while decrying insufficient health care for veterans.
Most recent polls in the state have shown a statistical dead heat among the three candidates, although Mrs. Clinton saw a glimmer of good news yesterday with an American Research Group poll showing her with a double-digit lead over Messrs. Obama and Edwards.
The candidates also received the first inkling of an important factor far outside their control: the weather forecast for Iowa on January 3. So far it looks to be cold but clear, which could be key to Mrs. Clinton’s efforts to turn out older voters who could be reluctant to venture out at night to caucus in a storm. Unlike a traditional primary or general election where voters can head to the polls at any time during the day, caucuses are held at night and Iowans must set aside up to three hours to participate.
Both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama are also banking on support from first-time caucus-goers. The candidate who could stand to gain from inclement weather that suppresses turnout, analysts said, is Mr. Edwards, who has developed deeper ties to the state dating back to 2004 and who has more support among Iowans who have caucused before.
“Edwards is probably the most confident that his people will show up,” a professor of political science at the University of Iowa, Peverill Squire, said.
The Republican race is less focused on Iowa, a reality underscored by the fact that two leading candidates, Mayor Giuliani and Michael Huckabee, are planning to be in Florida today.
Courting gun owners, Mr. Huckabee yesterday went pheasant hunting with a 12-gauge shotgun in Iowa, where he leads in the polls. The former Arkansas governor is scheduled to attend a round of fund-raisers today, hoping to bolster his campaign coffers before the fourth-quarter filing period ends December 31.
Though he will return to Iowa tomorrow and Saturday, Mr. Giuliani has largely written off the state, focusing instead on Florida, which holds its primary on January 29th and where he is clinging to a lead over Mr. Huckabee in the polls.
Of the five leading Republicans, only Fred Thompson is spending the entire final week in Iowa. Mitt Romney, running second in the polls, will return there tomorrow after a swing through New Hampshire.
The Democratic campaign is a different story. The top candidates all see Iowa as the potentially decisive battleground, and Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Obama, and Mr. Edwards are spending the last week exclusively in the state.
As she did earlier this month, Mrs. Clinton is bringing a cadre of prominent surrogates, including President Clinton and a former Iowa governor, Tom Vilsack, to campaign with her. And she is dispatching a secondary team of supporters, which her campaign has dubbed “Hill’s Angels,” to drum up enthusiasm for the former first lady at events. The group includes her campaign chairman, Terence McAuliffe, advisers Ann Lewis and Judy Lichtman, and even a number of longtime friends of Chelsea Clinton.
Coinciding with the final push, Mrs. Clinton also released a television commercial in Iowa and New Hampshire titled “Stakes” that suggests she is the candidate to lead the nation during troubled times. The 30-second spot dispenses with narration and instead flashes images including a soldier’s helmet, a “foreclosure” sign, and damage from Hurricane Katrina over a somber score.
The ad was released hours after a deputy campaign manager for the Edwards campaign, Jonathan Prince, sent a memo to supporters and the press predicting that Mrs. Clinton would mimic President Bush’s winning re-election strategy in 2004 by touting her national security credentials to close the race. “We believe Democratic voters will not be fooled by efforts to play to their fears,” Mr. Prince wrote. He also predicted that Mr. Obama would step up his attacks on Mr. Edwards as a confirmation of a surge in momentum for the former North Carolina senator.