In the early voting state of Iowa, Democrat Hillary Clinton holds a dwindling lead over rival Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney has opened a big margin over rival Rudy Giuliani in the 2008 presidential race, a new state poll said on Monday.

The Hawkeye poll, conducted by the University of Iowa, showed Clinton at about 29 percent, barely edging Obama at 27 percent. In August, Clinton led Obama by 25 percent to 19 percent in Iowa.

John Edwards, the 2004 Democratic vice presidential nominee, fell to 20 percent from 26 percent in August, the poll showed.

“No other candidates seem to be making a move,” among Democrats, said poll director David Redlawsk of the University of Iowa.

He said Clinton performed better among women and older voters, while Obama scored better among men and young voters. Historically, older Iowans turn out for the contest at a higher rate than young voters.

Among Republicans, Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, held a strong double-digit lead over Giuliani, with 36 percent to the former New York mayor’s 13.1 percent.

Giuliani was essentially in a second-place tie with former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who was at 12.8 percent, and former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson at 11.4 percent. Arizona Sen. John McCain was at 6 percent in the poll.

The growth for Romney, who registered support from 28 percent of state Republicans in August, followed his triumph in a straw poll in Iowa in August that is viewed as an early test of strength in the state.

Huckabee finished a surprise second in the straw poll, and used it to climb from 1.8 percent in August.

“Republican caucus-goers are finally starting to make some choices,” Redlawsk said, noting Romney was the only Republican who polled better among women than men. 

The Democratic race in Iowa is much tighter than in national polls, where Clinton, the New York senator, has a wide lead over Obama, an Illinois senator. Giuliani leads the Republican field in national polls, well ahead of Romney.

Iowa has set a Jan. 3, 2008, date for its kick-off presidential contest, which can generate a huge burst of momentum for the winner or for candidates who perform better than expected.

The poll of 306 Democratic caucus-goers had a margin of error of plus or minus 5.5 percentage points, and the poll of 285 Democratic caucus-goers had a margin of error of plus or minus 5.8 percentage points.

Reuters Television correspondent Jon Decker reports on the last week on the campaign trail including presidential candidates focusing on the possible threat posed by Iran as well as World Series politics and birthday bash fundraising.

Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama has faced a firestorm of controversy for his South Carolina gospel concert tour because it includes a singer who has been openly hostile towards homosexuals — but the candidate won’t hear a note of the music.
 
While the show goes on in South Carolina, Obama will spend Saturday campaigning in Iowa and has no public events on Sunday. His campaign said the Illinois senator had never planned to attend the concerts.
 
“It was always scheduled to be a surrogate tour,” said spokesman Ben LaBolt.
 
Obama has been criticized by leading gay organizations because the tour includes Donnie McClurkin, an outspoken critic of homosexuality, and some have called for him to drop the singer from the tour.
 
Instead, Obama spoke to leaders in the gay community earlier this week and tried to smooth over things by adding an openly gay minister (Rev. Andy Sidden) to give the opening prayer at the Sunday concert when McClurkin will perform.

– Photo credit: Mario Anzuoni (Obama with Melissa Etheridge at a forum sponsored by the Human Rights Campaign Foundation)

Vice President Dick Cheney has not yet reached out to “Cousin Barack” about their ancestral ties, and joked on Friday that he was uncertain how it would affect the Democrat’s campaign for the White House.

The vice president’s wife, Lynne Cheney, this month said she had discovered while researching her new book that her husband and Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois were eighth cousins.

Larry Kudlow of CNBC asked Cheney in an interview whether he had spoken with Obama since learning of their family ties.

“Cousin Barack?” Cheney said. He said they had not had the opportunity to talk about it.

“I didn’t know whether that would help him or hurt him, so I thought I’d probably stay away from him,” Cheney said. “But apparently we do have a common ancestor, about eight or nine generations back.”

Regardless of the common ancestor, Mareen Devall, the two turned out quite different. Cheney, a Republican, pushed for going to war with Iraq, while Obama wants to pull U.S. troops out.

– Reporting by Tabassum Zakaria

– Photo credit: Jason Reed (Obama with Cheney in 2005)

A dozen Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives have already announced they won’t seek reelection next year — and there may soon be more in the face of Democrats who are seen likely to retain control of the chamber in the 2008 elections.
 
Yet the head of the House Republican campaign committee says he will not try to talk anyone into staying.
 
“If you don’t want to be here, get out of the way. There will be a long line (of potential replacements),” Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma told reporters in a conference call this week. “If someone is leaving because they don’t want to serve for personal reasons or whatever, it’s mistake to try to make them stay.”
 
Cole said the number of Republicans who have announced their resignations is about average for this time of year. He said the bigger problem his party faces is that so far no Democrats have said they won’t to seek another term.
 
Why are they staying?
 
“Moving from from the minority to the majority adds new life to members, particularly, frankly, if they’re in their late 60’s or 70’s,” Cole said. “They figure … I’m finally got the majority again. I’m going to stay here and enjoy this chairmanship.”
 
Regardless, Cole said he doesn’t expect to lose seats next year, and believes Democrats are making themselves vulnerable.
 
“The strategy they are pursuing — which is to still attack a president who’s not going to be here after 2008, and to show an inability to sit down and work with the minority to get things done — is a huge mistake,” said Cole, noting his own party made a similar mistake of its own a decade ago when it controlled Congress and Democrat Bill Clinton was president.

– Reporting by Thomas Ferraro

Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul may barely register in opinion polls, but that hasn’t dampened the enthusiasm of his tech-savvy supporters.

Fans of the libertarian Texas congressman have swamped reader polls, deluged political reporters with critical e-mails, and exploited sites like Digg to push their candidate to the forefront. “Ron Paul” is consistently one of the top search terms on Technorati, a blog search engine.

But now they may have gone too far. “You cannot pimp Ron Paul,” the conservative Red State blog decreed yesterday, banning all Paul-related comments from new users.

Why?

“You can probably guess. Unless you lack the self-awareness to understand just how annoying, time-consuming, and bandwidth-wasting responding to the same idiotic arguments from a bunch of liberals pretending to be Republicans can be,” moderator Leon Wolf wrote.

There may be an alternate explanation, Wolf allowed: “We are a bunch of fascists and we’re upset that you’ve discovered where we keep the black helicopters, so we’re silencing you in an attempt to keep you from warning the rest of your brethren so we can round you all up and send you to re-education camps all at once.”

UPDATE: Paul spokesman Jesse Benton retorted: “Redstate is a private entity and they are free to do as they see fit. Still, I have to question the judgement of a self identified conservative organization banning supporters of the most conservative candidate.”

Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden, who has been known to stick his foot in his mouth a time or or two, was on the defensive again on Thursday over comments he made to the Washington Post suggested D.C. schools were failing because they were full of minorities.
 
An excerpt from the Washington Post:
 
“There’s less than one percent of the population of Iowa that is African American. There is probably less than four of five percent that are minorities. What is in Washington? So look, it goes back to what you start off with, what you’re dealing with,” said Biden. 
 
“When you have children coming from dysfunctional homes, when you have children coming from homes where there’s no books, where the mother from the time they’re born doesn’t talk to them — as opposed to the mother in Iowa who’s sitting out there and talks to them, the kid starts out with a 300 word larger vocabulary at age three. Half this education gap exists before the kid steps foot in the classroom,” Biden said.
 
His campaign later gave the Post a statement trying to clarify his remarks: “This was not a race-based distinction, but a discussion of the problems kids face who don’t have the same socio-economic support system (and all that implies — nutrition, pre K, etc.) entering grade school and the impact of those disadvantages on outcomes.”
 
The comments only served as a reminder of some of Biden’s other questionable statements, such as his comment earlier this year that Illinois Democratic Sen. Barack Obama, an African-American running for president, was clean and articulate.
 
Biden was on more comfortable turf on Thursday. Flanked by lawmen on Capitol Hill, he unveiled an ambitious $11 billion proposal to combat the nation’s rising crime rate.
 
“The federal government has taken its focus off street crime since 9/11, asking law enforcement officers to do more with less,” the Delaware Democrat said.
 
His bill would focus largely on hiring an additional 50,000 police officers, 1,000 FBI agents and 500 federal drug agents, while also expanding prevention programs and renewing a ban on assault weapons.
 
Biden sponsored a 1994 crime bill that created the Community Oriented Policing Services Program (COPS), which funded 118,000 police officers nationwide. Biden complained Bush virtually eliminated it, and that U.S. funding for state and local law enforcement programs has dropped 75 percent since 2002, the president second year in office.
 
Asked about the prospects of getting his new bill through Congress and signed by Bush, Biden admitted it would be tough but possible particularly with the help of law officers set to lobby lawmakers.
 
The long-shot White House hopeful also said: “I want to get it set up, so when I’m president it rolls.”

– Additional reporting by Thomas Ferraro

– Photo credit: Mike Carlson

This is not Chairman Mao's little red Facebook.

People for the American Way, a liberal activist group, has constructed The Right-Wing Facebook for U.S. Republican presidential candidates. (And goes to pains to note that it is satire and not related to the real social network Facebook)

It features profiles of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, actor and retired Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson, Arizona Sen. John McCain and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

Their status?

Rudy Giuliani is thinking no marriage for gays means more marriage for the rest of us.

Mike Huckabee is thinking he has a lot to offer as number two on a ticket.

John McCain is raiding his kids' piggy banks.

Mitt Romney is trying to remember which one is Tagg...

Fred Thompson is massaging his jowls.

Their networks link to various "friends," mainly the more outspoken members of the GOP such as former presidential candidate Gary Bauer and former Virginia Gov. George Allen. Also check out the candidates' favorite books, movies and so forth. They're just funny enough that we're wondering if someone will do one for the Dems.

(Screen grab from Rudy Giuliani satire page from http://www.rightwingfacebook.org)

Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton turns 60 on Friday and is throwing a fund-raising bash tonight in New York that will feature some of her favorite performers, including emcee comedian Billy Crystal.
 
Other notables include the rock band The Wallflowers and Elvis Costello as well as a cadre of politicians including her husband, former President Bill Clinton, and New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer.
 
Tickets for a seat at the Beacon Theater on the posh New York Upper West Side went for $100 to $2,300, the maximum donation that can be made to a presidential candidate. (The venue can hold more than 2,500 people.)
 
Clinton’s campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle sent a birthday fundraising appeal out to supporters that included a story about one party her staff threw her when she was first lady:
 
“After all the talk of her changing hairstyles during the campaign, the staff thought it would be funny to surprise her by dressing up as different “Hillarys” — there was Headband Hillary, Campaign Hillary, Lawyer Hillary, Short-Hair Hillary. I was the 1992 Democratic Convention Hillary — with the sassy haircut.”
 
Republicans issued their own birthday greeting to Clinton — issuing a list of spending projects she has proposed during her presidential campaign that they say would cost more than $763 billion.
 
“While Hillary Clinton may be wishing for government-run health care, Washington-controlled retirement plans, and budget-busting baby bonds, the American people are wishing they won’t have to pay for Clinton’s $750 billion in additional spending,” said Republican National Committee spokesman Danny Diaz.

Back in the mid-1980s when Rudy Giuliani was a federal prosecutor, he apparently escaped the wrath of New York’s big five Mafia crime families — but just barely.   
 
The New York Post, quoting FBI documents, reported on Thursday the mob bosses decided by a 3-to-2 margin not to try to whack Giuliani who later became the city’s mayor and now is a presidential hopeful.
 
But before cooler heads prevailed, at least two of the dons argued fervently that the mob-busting U.S. attorney should sleep with the fishes, the Post reported.
 
The news came out during the New York trial of former FBI supervisor Lindley DeVecchio, accused of orchestrating four gangland murders.
 
The Giuliani campaign was quick to crow about the revelation, putting out an email to reporters saying it was evidence of Giuliani’s “tough on crime attitude.”

And tough-guy Rudy shrugged off the revelations, speaking to Mike Gallaher’s talk radio show. He said threats on his life went with the territory as a federal prosecutor.

“The one that really embarrassed me, Mike, was when I was first U.S. attorney, they put out a contract to kill me for $800,000. After 5 years of being U.S. attorney, they put out another contract to kill me, another group, for only $400,000,” he said. 

However, it is unclear whether this new development will take the heat off Giuliani, a New York Yankees fan, for saying this week he would root for the Boston Red Sox in the World Series.
 
“I will be rooting for the Red Sox because I am an American League fan,” he told reporters on Tuesday in New Hampshire, where the Red Sox are popular.
 
Could he be pandering to the Red Sox faithful in the early voting state of New Hampshire? The Democratic National Committee thinks so.
 
“Memo to Rudy: Your Red Sox pandering can’t fool NH voters,” the DNC said in an email.