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Candidates Stump Hard As Caucuses Near In Iowa

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By DAVID ESPO, The Associated Press

Published: January 1, 2008

DES MOINES, Iowa - Presidential contenders squeezed a final few hours of campaigning out of the old year on Monday in a race marked by exhausting personal appeals, anonymous phone calls and a negative campaign commercial that vanished into thin air.

Stepping before more than a dozen television cameras, Republican Mike Huckabee first swore off negative ads in the Iowa race, then previewed a commercial in which he was seen saying of his of rival Mitt Romney: "If a man's dishonest to obtain a job, he'll be dishonest on the job. Iowans deserve better."

Romney, the former Republican governor of Massachusetts, was freshly critical of Huckabee's record as governor, saying voters would be put off by his rival's position on immigration and the pardons he had granted while governor.

The three top Democratic rivals, Barack Obama, John Edwards and Hillary Rodham Clinton, made more than a dozen appearances among them before 2007 ended.

"We want our government back, we want our democracy back," Edwards told an audience in Storm Lake, Iowa. Locked in a tight three-way race, the former North Carolina senator claimed late momentum for a campaign built around his pledge to fight special interests in Washington.

Clinton seemed primed to counter. "I submit to you, there isn't anybody running who's taken on more special interests and taken on more incoming fire and survived them than I have," she told a crowd in Keokuk.

Without mentioning Edwards by name, she appeared to gently mock the fired-up speaking style he uses to deliver his populist pledge. "It's not something you have to do by yelling and screaming," she said. "Save your energy."

Obama stuck doggedly to the campaign pitch that has made him the most serious black presidential candidate in history. "You can't afford to settle for the same old politics," he told a crowd in Perry.

With only three days remaining until the caucuses, several Democratic voters reported receiving anonymous telephone calls from self-proclaimed pollsters spreading unflattering information.

Some calls said Obama's health plan would leave millions uninsured. Others said Edwards' plans for a troop withdrawal from Iraq were dangerous or that Clinton would lead the party to defeat in the fall.

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