Candidates start final sprint in Iowa
By Scott Helman, Globe Staff
DES MOINES -- With thousands of undecided voters still up for grabs in the final week before voting begins, the leading presidential contenders today aimed their closing arguments at those still settling on a candidate or just tuning into the most wide-open nomination races in decades.
Their two-day Christmas break over, most candidates resumed campaigning in Iowa, where Democrats and Republicans will caucus one week from Thursday and where, like New Hampshire, voters are still weighing the two fields carefully.
Just 38 percent of Republicans and 52 percent of Democrats in Iowa have decided whom to support, the most recent CNN poll shows, while the rest are either undecided or only leaning toward a candidate and thus open to persuasion. In New Hampshire, where the primary comes five days after Iowa, only 28 percent of likely Democratic voters and 35 percent of Republicans have made up their minds, according to a Globe survey published Sunday.
With that in mind, the candidates, in a blitz of appearances and new TV ads, sought to frame the election in clear terms for undecided voters in both states.
Senator Hillary Clinton of New York returned to the theme of experience, hoping voters will ultimately want a leader with a deep Washington resume. In a joint rally yesterday with former President Bill Clinton in Iowa, Clinton argued that she alone has the seasoning and track record to usher in a "new beginning" at the White House."
"Hillary has an unbroken record of making decisions that made a positive change in other people's lives," Bill Clinton told an overflow crowd of more than 300 at Mount Pleasant Community High School.
Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, the foil in Clinton’s pitch of experience, also campaigned across Iowa yesterday, telling voters that experience means little if it means repeating the same mistakes over and over.
Obama, who is scheduled to sum up his case in broad, thematic speech Thursday in Des Moines, also tried to differentiate himself as the true candidate of change, contending that his rivals were merely appropriating his message.
Former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, who finished second in the 2004 caucuses and is claiming momentum in the closing weeks, spent the day in New Hampshire, but returns to Iowa Thursday to kick off a bus tour focusing on the plight of the middle class, which he says has been decimated by corporate greed and wrong-headed priorities in Washington.
Polls show a tight three-way contest among the three Democrats in Iowa. Clinton and Obama are neck-and-neck for the lead in New Hampshire, the Globe poll indicated.
On the Republican side, Mitt Romney, who once held sizable leads in Iowa and New Hampshire, now finds himself threatened in both states. Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee has come from nowhere to overtake him in Iowa, and Senator John McCain of Arizona, who won the 2000 New Hampshire primary, has pulled into a statistical tie in New Hampshire, the latest Globe poll shows.
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Only two candidates have been honest about their stand on illegal immigration. None of the Democrats can be trusted to close our national border with Mexico and enforce the laws that the overall citizenship of our Nation demands. Neither can we say the same for all but two of the Presidential candidates on the Republican side, except for Duncan Hunter and Fred Thompson. All the rest have a dismal record and to vote for a Democrat means a national disaster, as American taxpayers will be paying the bills, forced upon them by Federal mandate. The only unsuppressed truth you get is from the NUMBERSUSA site?
So be careful who you vote for, as only two would enforce the law!
Do you you know that America has one of the largest illegal alien populations in our prison system? That money could be put to great use, for the poverty in our land. Not illegal immigrants but our own citizens, who are hurting? It is shameful thate men and women, who came back from Korea, the Vietnam, the gulf are homeless? What about our own single Mothers. then their are Senior citizens, who are likely to suffer if Royal Bush signs into law a Social Security Agreement with Mexico? Then their is the huge sums of money, sent abroard for Nation building, while our own infrastructure of bridges, roads and tunnels collapse around us.
Both Democrats, Republicans and the citizens are to blame for the erosion of this great nation!
Taxpayers must stand with any official, who is willing to go that extra mile; no matter the political consequences. Very few politicians have the backbone to consumate the majority will of THE PEOPLE. They have become panderers to corporate and globalist open-border, unfair free-traders favors. America can no longer afford the $2 trillion dollar a year, to support the pariah contractors and businesses that hire illegal immigrants. They themselves receive all the profit, and the taxpayers gets the bill for hospitals, education and the massive prison appropriations. With between 12 to 20 million illegal aliens already here, with another estimated 17 million turning up on our shores by 2010, we are forced by federal law to subsidise these low income families. Taxpayers fall for this trick all the time, because the government doesn't tell us about food stamps, subsidised housing and a whole cornicopia of other free goodies. Its so easy for the citizen-taxpayer to carry the burden of cost's while the employer walks away. Free trade entities are behind the Bush administration unfettered movement of illegal cheap, foreign labor which is undermining our citizen workers wages. Most U.S. citizens have no concept of tomorrow, with outsourcing of jobs and business to foreign lands, along with the import of millions of people who can't speak our language and most have no wish to assimulate into our society. All but a few of our presidential contenders are not multi-millionaires, that show little interest in proposing laws protect our country from a globalist agenda? Both political parties are to blame, along with the american people for allowing this International globalist plan to continue. Our Industrial base is withering, unless you prefer a service nation? Big business must be held accountable for the destruction of our living standards. Hopefully, THE PEOPLE will show their intentions, starting with the Iowa Caucases and the upcoming New Hampshire Primaries! Are we going to have more of the same, with a depletion of our wealth and an erosion of our society. Or are we going to have fair free-trade and our national borders sealed for security and our prosperity?
"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
- - Abraham Lincoln
Barack Obama for President of the United States of America.
Say no to more Nepotism in our Democracy.
It''s time to Rise and Shine again America.