WASHINGTON - A group affiliated with supporters of Republican Mike Huckabee's presidential campaign is organizing caucusgoers in Iowa and making automated phone calls on his behalf and against his rivals.
The group, Common Sense Issues Inc., plans to reach voters through direct mail and advertising and to supplement Huckabee's get-out-the-vote operation in Iowa. Rival campaigns have said the automatic calls have planted negative information about their candidates.
Patrick Davis, the group's executive director, called the phone calls "personalized educational artificial intelligence," and said they are primarily meant to promote Huckabee. Davis said the group had not coordinated with the Huckabee campaign, which would amount to a violation of the law.
Yesterday, Huckabee urged an end to the calls.
"Our campaign has nothing to do with the push-polling and I wish they would stop," he said while campaigning in Iowa. "We don't want this kind of campaigning because it violates the spirit of our campaign. I don't want to become president because I disabled the other candidates, I want to become president because I am the best candidate."
ASSOCIATED PRESS
The 125,000-member Office and Professional Employees International Union is the latest part of Big Labor to cast its lot with Clinton, and a new Associated Press-Pew Research Center poll shows her leading in Iowa with 31 percent, compared with 26 percent for Barack Obama and 19 percent for John Edwards.
Meanwhile, liberal activists plan to begin airing a television ad today against Clinton in Iowa this week, the first non-Republican negative ad aimed at a Democratic presidential candidate.
Democratic Courage accused Clinton of making policy decisions on the basis of polls, not convictions. "We are concerned that she wouldn't be the best candidate in the general election or the best president because she is so easily bullied by the Republican attack machine," said Glenn Hurowitz, the group's president.
GLOBE STAFF, ASSOCIATED PRESS
Congressman Bruce Braley is the most senior Iowa Democrat to publicly announce for a candidate. Edwards is locked in a tight three-way contest with Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in Iowa, where his presidential hopes could rise or fall in the Jan. 3 caucuses.
"John is the only Democratic candidate who grew up in rural America, and he has most specific, most progressive and most far-reaching ideas," Braley, elected last year in Iowa's First Congressional District, said in a statement issued by the Edwards campaign. "I truly believe he is the best Democratic candidate to lead us to victory in 2008."
The fight against special interests is also at the heart of the new ad, in which Edwards blames insurance companies, pharmaceutical firms, and their lobbyists for blocking healthcare reform.
"You have to take their power away," he declares in the 30-second spot.
FOON RHEE
Red Sox hurler Curt Schilling, who has endorsed the Arizona senator, is scheduled to appear at the Derryfield School in Manchester in what is being billed as a "Politics & Sports Town Hall Meeting."
Charlie Sherman, a former WMUR-TV sportscaster and current WGIR radio host, will moderate the forum, where presumably McCain will handle most of the politics questions and Schilling most of the sports ones.
McCain - whose presidential bid is counting heavily on New Hampshire, where he won the Republican primary in 2000 - is fresh off the endorsement of the state's largest newspaper, the New Hampshire Union Leader, which said in a front-page editorial on Sunday that he is "the man to lead America."
The editorial said that, while "we don't agree with him on every issue," McCain "is the most trustworthy, competent, and conservative of all those seeking the nomination."
FOON RHEE
