CLINTON AIDE SAYS OBAMA VULNERABLE ON DRUG USE

A top official in Senator Clinton’s campaign warned that Republicans could use Senator Obama’s drug use to torpedo his candidacy if Democrats make him their nominee.

“The Republicans are not going to give up without a fight … and one of the things they’re certainly going to jump on is his drug use,” the co-chairman of Mrs. Clinton’s New Hampshire campaign, Billy Shaheen, told the Washington Post.

Mr. Obama has been candid on the campaign trail about his use of cocaine and marijuana as a teenager after he wrote about it in his memoir.

“It’ll be, ‘When was the last time? Did you ever give drugs to anyone? Did you sell them to anyone?'” Mr. Shaheen said. “There are so many openings for Republican dirty tricks. It’s hard to overcome.”

Raising the issue of drug use is risky for Mrs. Clinton, and her campaign said it had nothing to do with Mr. Shaheen’s comments, the Associated Press reported.

Mr. Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe, said in a statement that the remarks were an act of desperation. “She’s moved from Barack Obama’s kindergarten years to his teenage years in an increasingly desperate effort to slow her slide in the polls,” he said in part. “Senator Clinton’s campaign is recycling old news that Barack Obama has been candid about in a book he wrote years ago.”

HUCKABEE APOLOGIZES TO ROMNEY

Michael Huckabee said yesterday he personally apologized to Mitt Romney for asking a reporter if Mormons believed that “Jesus and the devil were brothers.” “I said to him face-to-face, ‘I don’t think you being a Mormon ought to make you more or less qualified to be president,'” the former Arkansas governor said in an appearance on CNN after the Republican presidential debate in Iowa.

Mr. Huckabee often declines to discuss Mr. Romney’s faith directly but has emphasized his career as a Baptist minister in his bid for the GOP nomination. He was quoted asking about Mormonism in a New York Times Magazine article set to run on Sunday.

Mr. Huckabee said he apologized to Mr. Romney right after the debate and that the former Massachusetts governor was “gracious” in response.

“I hope he knows I was sincere,” Mr. Huckabee said, speaking from the debate ‘spin room’ as a crowd of reporters hovered around him.

AD WATCH

A group dedicated to ending global poverty, the One Campaign, is buying $1.8 million in TV ads in Iowa and New Hampshire to urge voters to insist that presidential candidates take a stand against extreme poverty. The ad’s plea comes as the hopefuls’ names flash by on what looks like a series of campaign buttons.

Also:

• A new TV ad from Senator McCain in New Hampshire touts his endorsement by a prominent newspaper there, the Union-Leader of Manchester.

• Mayor Giuliani is also on the air in the Granite State with a radio ad stressing his record of tax cuts while mayor of New York.

• Mr. Romney is up with a TV ad in Michigan attacking Senator Clinton as inexperienced. “Hillary Clinton wants to run the largest enterprise in the world. She hasn’t run a corner store. … She has never run anything,” the former Massachusetts governor claims. He also dismisses her stint as first lady as merely “an internship.”

MONEY WATCH

A television ad criticizing Mr. Huckabee’s willingness to raise taxes as governor of Arkansas is being funded largely by an Arkansas banker, Jackson Stephens Jr., and a Massachusetts financier, John Childs.

ClubforGrowth. net, which placed the ads, told the Federal Election Commission Monday that they are backed by $200,000 from Mr. Stephens, $100,000 from Mr. Childs, and $75,000 from two other donors.

The group reported an initial buy of $161,000 for airtime in Iowa, South Carolina and nationally on Fox News.