The presidential candidates in the United States stepped up their personal attacks on Sunday to try to squeeze out an advantage in the extremely tight contest for the Iowa caucuses, now only three days away.
As Democratic and Republican candidates toured coffee shops, schools and town halls in the final push before the January 3 caucuses, new polls on Sunday showed the negative campaigning was effective.
There were signs that Mike Huckabee, who enjoyed a rapid rise in the polls in Iowa at the beginning of December, is suffering in the polls from a series of critical personal television adverts.
Another Republican frontrunner, Mitt Romney, was the subject of a dirty-tricks Christmas card over the weekend.
A Zogby poll, carried out jointly with Reuters and C-Span, saw Huckabee’s lead over Romney shrink to just 1%. The poll put the former Arkansas governor and Baptist preacher on 29%, with Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, on 28%, John McCain on 11% and Rudy Giuliani on 8%.
The poll also had the Democratic frontrunners close in Iowa, with Hillary Clinton on 31%, Barack Obama on 27% and John Edwards on 24%. ”We have two very tight races that are too close to call,” said the pollster, John Zogby.
The closeness of the contest also saw the Democrats losing the veneer of civility in their campaigns, with Edwards and Obama sharply attacking each other’s core message. Obama acknowledged on Sunday that the negative campaigning may have cost him some support, by raising doubts about his experience.
In an appearance on CBS television on Sunday, Edwards derided Obama’s promise to move beyond the divisive politics of Washington. ”I don’t think this academic theory that you can be nice to people — nice to the oil companies and drug companies and that they will just go along — will work,” Edwards said.
An MSNBC-McClatchy-Mason-Dixon poll on Sunday showed a marginal decline in support for Huckabee in Iowa. He slipped to 23% behind 27% for Romney, who has spent millions on adverts critical of Huckabee and McCain.
Huckabee told NBC television: ”Romney’s campaign ads are as dishonest to me as they are to McCain. It is one thing to attack us on our records. It is another to make it up.”
Pledges at the start of the campaign earlier this year to avoid negative campaigning have been abandoned by most of the candidates.
Huckabee, criticising a Romney ad suggesting he had been too liberal in issuing pardons while governor, was scathing about the negative campaigning. ”If I believed half of that stuff, I wouldn’t vote for myself,” he said.
An American Research Group poll released on Saturday also suggested Romney’s tactics are working, bumping him up to 32% against 23% for Huckabee. That was a reversal from its poll a fortnight ago, which had Huckabee on 28% and Romney on 17%.
In spite of his protestations, Huckabee, too, has gone for the personal, stressing his Christian credentials and, surreptitiously, contrasting these with Romney’s Mormonism. Much of Huckabee’s appeal in Iowa is to the Christian right.
In South Carolina, another key primary contest, Republicans received a bogus card supposedly from Romney that cited controversial passages from the Book of Mormon. ”It is sad and unfortunate that this kind of deception and trickery has been employed,” said Will Holley, Romney’s South Carolina spokesperson. ”There is absolutely no place for it in American politics.” — Guardian Unlimited Â