McCAIN SAYS IRAQ COULD MAKE OR BREAK HIS CANDIDACY

Senator McCain suggested yesterday that his candidacy could hinge on the American public’s view of the Iraq War. If Mr. McCain can’t convince voters that the current policy is a success, “then I lose. I lose,” he said in Ohio, the Associated Press reported. The likely Republican nominee immediately backtracked, saying he did not want to “put it that stark.” But he acknowledged that the success of his campaign this fall would in some measure be tied to public opinion about the war. Mr. McCain has been a steadfast supporter of the effort, and in his campaign’s darkest hours last year, he often said he’d rather lose a campaign than “lose a war.” He was an early advocate of the “surge” strategy and now often points to it as evidence of military success.

CLINTON, OBAMA CAMPAIGNS SPAR OVER OBAMA PHOTO

Senator Obama’s campaign angrily accused Senator Clinton’s team of dirty tricks yesterday after a gossipy Web site, the Drudge Report, published a photograph of Senator Obama in traditional Somali dress during a visit to Kenya and said Mrs. Clinton’s aides were circulating it as evidence of how the press ignores damaging information about Mr. Obama.

“The notion that they would try to use this to imply in some way that I’m foreign, I think is, you know, unfortunate,” Mr. Obama said in an interview with WBAPAM in Dallas. “Enough,” Mrs. Clinton’s campaign manager, Maggie Williams, said in a statement issued after Mr. Obama’s campaign blasted the Clinton camp over the tactic. “If Barack Obama’s campaign wants to suggest that a photo of him wearing traditional Somali clothing is divisive, they should be ashamed.”

Ms. Williams did not deny that the photo originated with the Clinton team, but Mrs. Clinton’s communications director, Howard Wolfson, said later he did not know who put it out. “I’m certainly not aware of anyone in this campaign having anything to do with it,” he said. He also discouraged news outlets from reporting on the flap unless they had “independent reporting” that the Clinton campaign was involved.

FORMER WHITE HOUSE SPOKESWOMAN: CLINTON’S CAMPAIGN ‘POORLY RUN’

A White House press secretary under President Clinton, Dee Dee Myers, says Senator Clinton has been “poorly served at times” by her campaign staff. “I think the campaign has in many ways been poorly run, which I don’t think anyone expected from her given all her experience and experienced people she surrounded herself with,” the spokeswoman told the “Inside City Hall” program on NY1. “I think gender has been in many ways even more of an obstacle for her than we thought it would be,” Ms. Myers said in the interview. “I think so many women in positions of authority — and she’s certainly one of them — have to walk that fine line between being authoritative and being a bitch. And she hasn’t always succeeded.”

ROMNEY’S SON MAY RUN FOR CONGRESS

Mitt Romney may have just ended his bid for the Republican presidential nomination, but his family may not be through with electoral politics for long. One of Mr. Romney’s five sons, Josh Romney, said he has been approached about running for Congress in Utah. “I haven’t ruled it out,” the younger Mr. Romney, 32, told the Deseret Morning News about the possibility of challenging Democratic Rep. Jim Matheson in Utah’s 2nd District.

LIBERAL GROUPS PLAN $20M PRESSURE CAMPAIGN TO LINK IRAQ WAR AND RECESSION

Several liberal groups, including MoveOn.org and VoteVets.org, announced yesterday that they will spend a total of more than $20 million on television ads and grassroots organizing attempting to label the current economic slowdown as the “Iraq recession.” “People don’t understand why we are spending $500 billion and counting in Iraq,” a former Democratic presidential candidate backing the effort, John Edwards, told reporters yesterday.