Republican John McCain also campaigned in Ohio on Monday, and told reporters he must convince a war-weary country that U.S. policy in Iraq is succeeding to win the White House, or else “then I lose. I lose.”

He then backed off that remark, saying merely that Iraq would be a part of voters’ judgment of his ability to handle national security.

The five-year-old Iraq conflict is emerging as a fault line in the general election, with the Arizona senator calling for the U.S. military continuing its mission while his Democratic opponents urge quick withdrawal.

A coalition of anti-war groups that was influential in last year’s political debate on Iraq says it plans to spend more than $20 million this year to convince voters that McCain and the Republican Party’s support for the war is bad for the economy.

In a conference call with reporters Monday, activist leaders said they believe voters will blame Republicans this fall for supporting the war at a time of rising health care and college costs and a mortgage foreclosure crisis.

“Leaders who do not recognize this connection will be at a disadvantage come Election Day,” said Jeff Blum, director of USAction, which plans to spend $10 million organizing a grass-roots effort against Republican candidates. Blum said the group intends to dispatch hundreds of thousands of volunteers to go door to door to convince voters that the Republicans’ war effort is hurting the economy.

WASHINGTON – Hillary Rodham Clinton suggested Barack Obama was not prepared to handle a global crisis as she looked ahead to an MSNBC debate that offered one of her last chances to blunt her rival’s momentum before next week’s must-win primaries.

The two Democratic presidential contenders face off in a debate at Cleveland State University just a week before the March 4 primaries in Ohio and Texas that Clinton must win to keep alive her faltering bid to become the first U.S. female president.

MSNBC will telecast the debate from 9-10:30 p.m. ET.  NBC’s Brian Williams will moderate and be joined by “Meet the Press” moderator and NBC News Washington Bureau Chief Tim Russert. It will be streamed live on msnbc.com.

AUSTIN: Barack Obama escaped unscathed from a key debate which Democratic foe Hillary Clinton hoped to use to slow his surging White House quest, 12 days before their next electoral showdown. On another day of high drama in the relentless 2008 election, presumptive Republican nominee John McCain meanwhile was forced to deny he had an extra-marital affair after a report linked him to a female lobbyist.

Senator Clinton needed a game-changing moment at Thursday night’s debate at the University of Texas, as new polls showed her rival slashing her leads in her must-win fortress states of Texas and Ohio, which vote on March 4.

Obama meanwhile avoided serious gaffes, fought back against her claims that some of his soaring oratory was plagiarised, and suggested her vote to authorise war in Iraq sparked questions about her leadership skills. “If your candidacy is going to be about words, then they should be your own words. That’s, I think, a very simple proposition,” Clinton said, drawing cheers and some jeers from the audience at the University of Texas.

“Lifting whole passages from someone else’s speeches is not change you can believe in, it’s change you can Xerox,” the New York senator said, ripping off her rival’s campaign slogan.

But Obama rejected accusations that he had stolen language from Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick as “silly season” politics and in a cheeky quip defended his speeches: “I’ve got to admit, some of them are pretty good.” In her strongest moments, Clinton scored points on her signature issue of healthcare, and at the end of the encounter gave an emotion-tinged answer on her greatest personal challenges.

Clinton lost in Maine on Sunday, a day after the New York senator and former first lady was stung by defeats in Nebraska, Washington state, Louisiana and the U.S. Virgin Islands. She is struggling to overcome Obama’s financial and political rally that came on the back of his impressive showing in last week’s "Super Tuesday" series of Democratic contests in 22 states.

The Democratic nomination is far from decided, with weeks or months of campaigning still ahead. Clinton is an experienced, well-financed campaigner certainly capable of pulling off more surprise wins, as she did Jan. 8 in New Hampshire.

In the latest overall totals in The Associated Press count, Clinton had 1,136 delegates to 1,108 for Obama. The totals include so-called superdelegates, which are party leaders not chosen at primaries or caucuses, free to change their minds. A total of 2,025 delegates is required to win the nomination.

In Maine, with 99 percent of the participating precincts reporting, Obama led with 59 percent of the vote, to 40 percent for Clinton. Obama won 15 of Maine’s delegates to the national convention and Clinton won nine.

Obama, who seeks to be the U.S.’s first black president, was buoyant after his weekend winning sweep. He even won a Grammy on Sunday for his audio version of his book "The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts On Reclaiming The American Dream," beating former Presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter in the best spoken word album category.

"I have the ability to bring people together," he said. Because of that, he said, "I think I can beat John McCain more effectively," he said, challenging the presumptive Republican nominee for November general elections.

WASHINGTON – Barack Obama scored a clean sweep of five weekend contests, eroding rival Hillary Rodham Clinton’s narrow lead in the Democratic presidential race and prompting the former first lady to reshuffle her campaign staff in a bid to stop his momentum.

For now, at least, the wind is at Obama’s back. Clinton replaced campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle with longtime aide Maggie Williams ahead of nomination races Tuesday in Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C., where polls published Sunday showed Obama leading.

The two states and the U.S. capital all have a sizable number of black Democratic voters, a constituency that has aided Obama in earlier contests.

McCain, too, was nursing Saturday and Sunday losses. He took the weekend off from campaigning despite embarrassing, but not pivotal, losses against preacher-turned-politician Mike Huckabee in two Republican races on Saturday. Huckabee, a favorite of evangelical Christians, beat McCain in Kansas and Louisiana, highlighting the difficulty the veteran Arizona senator faces in convincing the party’s core right-wing blocs that he is one of them.

McCain, however, remained far ahead of Huckabee in the delegate count, and retained his virtually assured nomination that came on the back of rival Mitt Romney’s decision to suspend his campaign. McCain has 719 delegates out of a total 1,191 needed to secure the Republican nomination. Huckabee had 234 delegates.

Since his string of Super Tuesday wins, McCain has concentrated on wooing conservatives who view him as a political maverick on key issues like immigration and tax cuts. The former Vietnam prisoner-of-war and decorated Navy pilot secured a boost Sunday when Bush referred to him in a taped interview as a "true conservative." But the president also stressed that McCain must do more to win over conservatives.

WASHINGTON (CNN) – Sen. John McCain became the likely Republican nominee after Mitt Romney decided to suspend his campaign Thursday. Now, the Democrats are debating who would do better against the Arizona Republican.

Democrats are debating who would do better against Sen. John McCain, the GOP front-runner.

Two polls this month have asked registered voters nationwide how they would vote if the choice were between McCain and Democratic Sen. Hillary Clinton.

A CNN poll, conducted by the Opinion Research Corporation February 1-3, shows Clinton three points ahead of McCain, 50 percent to 47 percent. That’s within the poll’s margin of error of 3 percentage points, meaning that the race is statistically tied..

A Time magazine poll, conducted February 1-4, also shows a dead heat between Clinton and McCain. Each was backed by 46 percent of those polled.

Sen. Barack Obama believes he can do better, arguing "I’ve got appeal that goes beyond our party."

In the CNN poll, Obama leads McCain by 8 points, 52 percent to 44 percent. That’s outside the margin of error, meaning that Obama has the lead.

And in the Time poll, Obama leads McCain by 7 points, 48 percent to 41 percent — a lead also outside of the poll’s margin of error of 3 percentage points.

WASHINGTON (AP) – Sen. Barack Obama swept the Louisiana primary and caucuses in Nebraska and Washington state Saturday night, slicing into Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s slender delegate lead in their historic race for the Democratic presidential nomination.

The Illinois senator also won caucuses in the Virgin Islands, completing his best night of the campaign.

“Today, voters from the West Coast to the Gulf Coast to the heart of America stood up to say ‘yes we can”‘ Obama told a cheering audience of Democrats at a party dinner in Richmond, Va.

He jabbed simultaneously at Clinton and Arizona Sen. John McCain, saying the election was a choice between debating the Republican nominee-in-waiting “about who has the most experience in Washington, or debating him about who’s most likely to change Washington. Because that’s a debate we can win.”

Clinton preceded Obama to the podium. She did not refer to the night’s voting, instead turning against McCain. “We have tried it President Bush’s way,” she said, “and now the Republicans have chosen more of the same.”

She left quickly after her speech, departing before Obama’s arrival. But his supporters made their presence known, sending up chants of “Obama” from the audience as she made her way offstage.

Obama’s winning margins ranged from substantial to crushing.

He won roughly two-thirds of the vote in Washington state and Nebraska, and almost 90 percent in the Virgin Islands.

With returns counted from nearly two-thirds of the Louisiana precincts, he was gaining 53 percent of the vote, to 39 percent for the former first lady. As in his earlier Southern triumphs in Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina, Obama, a black man, rode a wave of African-American support to victory in Louisiana.

In all, the Democrats scrapped for 161 delegates in the night’s contests.

In initial allocations, Obama had won 31, Clinton nine.

In overall totals in The Associated Press count, Clinton had 1,064 delegates to 1,029 for Obama. A total of 2,025 is required to win the nomination at the national convention in Denver.

The Democratic race moved into a new, post-Super Tuesday phase as McCain flunked his first ballot test since becoming the Republican nominee-in-waiting. He lost Kansas caucuses to Mike Huckabee, gaining less than 24 percent of the vote.

Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, got nearly 60 percent of the vote a few hours after telling conservatives in Washington, “I majored in miracles, and I still believe in them.” He won all 36 delegates at stake.

Huckabee also edged ahead of McCain in caucuses in Washington, and in Louisiana’s primary, where he flirted with gaining 50 percent of the vote, the requirement for pocketing 20 delegates.

For all his brave talk, Huckabee was hopelessly behind in the delegate race. McCain had 719, compared with 234 for Huckabee and 14 for Texas Rep. Ron Paul. It takes 1,191 to win the nomination at the national convention.

The Democrats’ race was as close as the Republicans’ was not, a contest between Obama, hoping to become the first black president, and Clinton, campaigning to become the first female commander in chief.

The two rivals contest primaries on Tuesday in Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia, all states where Obama and his campaign are hopeful of winning.

Preliminary results of a survey of voters leaving their polling places in Louisiana showed that nearly half of those casting ballots were black. As a group, African-Americans have overwhelmingly favored Obama in earlier primaries, helping him to wins in several Southern states.

Obama was gaining about 80 percent of the black votes statewide, while Clinton was winning 70 percent support among whites, the exit poll showed.

One in seven Democratic voters and about one in 10 Republicans said Hurricane Katrina had caused their families severe hardship from which they have not recovered. There was another indication of the impact the storm had on the state. Early results suggested that northern Louisiana accounted for a larger share of the electorate than in the past, presumably the result of the decline in population in the hurricane-battered New Orleans area.

McCain cleared his path to the party nomination earlier in the week with a string of Super Tuesday victories that drove former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney from the race. He spent the rest of the week trying to reassure skeptical conservatives, at the same time party leaders quickly closed ranks behind him.

His Kansas defeat aside, McCain also suffered a symbolic defeat when Romney edged him out in a straw poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference meeting across town from the White House.

The day’s contests opened a new phase in the Democratic race between Clinton and Obama.

The Feb. 5 Super Tuesday primaries and caucuses in 22 states, which once looked likely to effectively settle the race, instead produced a near-equal delegate split.

That left Obama and Clinton facing the likelihood of a grind-it-out competition lasting into spring – if not to the summer convention itself.

With the night’s events, 29 of the 50 states have selected delegates.

Two more – Michigan and Florida – held renegade primaries and the Democratic National Committee has vowed not to seat any delegates chosen at either of them.

Maine, with 24 delegates, holds caucuses on Sunday. Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia and voting by Americans overseas are next, on Tuesday, with 175 combined.

Then follows a brief intermission, followed by a string of election nights, some crowded, some not.

The date of March 4 looms large, 370 delegates in primaries in Ohio, Texas, Rhode Island and Vermont.

Mississippi is alone in holding a primary one week later, with a relatively small 33 delegates at stake.

Puerto Rico anchors the Democratic calendar, with 55 delegates chosen in caucuses on June 7.

If Super Tuesday failed to settle the campaign, it produced a remarkable surge in fundraising.

Obama’s aides announced he had raised more than $7 million on line in the two days that followed.

Clinton disclosed she had loaned her campaign $5 million late last month in an attempt to counter her rival’s Super Tuesday television advertising. She raised more than $6 million in the two days after the busiest night in primary history.

The television ad wars continued unabated.

Obama has been airing commercials for more than a week in television markets serving every state that has a contest though Feb 19.

Clinton began airing ads midweek in Washington state, Maine and Nebraska, and added Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia on Friday.

The exit poll was conducted by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for The Associated Press and the television networks.

The faltering economy has caught the Iraq war as people’s top worry, a national poll suggests, with the rapid turnabout already showing up on the presidential campaign trail and in maneuvering between President Bush and Congress.

Twenty percent named the economy as the foremost problem in an Associated Press-Ipsos poll released Friday, virtually tying the 21 percent who cited the war. In October, the last time the survey posed the open-ended question about the country’s top issue, the war came out on top by a 2-1 majority.

About equal proportions of Republicans, Democrats and independents in the new poll said the economy was their major worry, suggesting the issue looms as a potent one in both parties’ presidential contests. It was also cited evenly across all levels of income, underscoring the variety of economic problems the country faces.

Amid increasing trade, job, housing, stock market and gasoline price woes, candidates from each party have started talking about how they would bolster the economy. The issue looms as the dominant one in the next presidential contest: Tuesday’s Republican primary in Michigan, which had a 7.4 percent unemployment rate in November that is the nation’s worst.

‘Concern about Iraq is diminishing’
Even as signs of economic weakness in this country have grown in recent months, U.S. and Iraqi casualties in Iraq have been dropping since the summer. Though most in the U.S. remain against the war, growing numbers say they think President Bush’s troop increase last year has been working, and politicians say the issue is raised with decreasing frequency by constituents.

“The lines are crossing now,” said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster not working for a presidential candidate. “As Iraq becomes more stable and less violent, concern about Iraq is diminishing. It will still be an important issue, but the economy is filling the vacuum.”

Economic concerns were voiced about evenly in most parts of the country in the AP-Ipsos survey. It was particularly high in the Rust Belt region of Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Wisconsin, states that are expected to be pivotal in the November election. About one in three there named the economy.

The poll offered another example of economic anxiety as an index measuring consumer confidence fell to its all-time low in the six years Ipsos has been measuring it. The RBC Cash Index dropped to 56.3 in early January, down from 65.9 in December.

The war was the top problem mentioned by three in 10 Democrats, about twice the number of Republicans who listed it. About one in five independents also put it as the top concern.

Health care was another important issue for Democrats, while Republicans also named morality, immigration and terrorism.

Issues key to voters
In exit polls of voters in last Tuesday’s New Hampshire presidential primaries, people in both parties named the economy as their top concern, including 38 percent of Democrats and 31 percent of Republicans. Of those citing the economy, the most votes went to Hillary Rodham Clinton for Democrats and John McCain among Republicans — and each won their party’s contest.

In the Jan. 3 Iowa presidential caucuses, the economy was tied with Iraq for most important issue among Democrats. Illegal immigration was the most mentioned by Republicans, followed by the economy. The winners in that state — Republican Mike Huckabee and Democrat Barack Obama — also got the most support among those chiefly worried about the economy.

On Capitol Hill, Democratic leaders are considering crafting legislation for stimulating the economy that might include tax rebates, longer unemployment benefits and more food stamps. Bush has said he is watching to see if federal steps will be needed, which officials have said might include tax rebates for individuals and tax breaks for business investment.

On Friday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., wrote Bush saying they should try to agree quickly on a package. Still, a clash could well occur because there is a history of Democrats seeking more spending and narrower tax cuts than Republicans want.

The issues question in the AP-Ipsos poll was asked of 535 people in telephone interviews conducted from Jan. 7-9. Their responses had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4.2 percentage points.

With Senator Barack Obama vowing to challenge Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton on her home turf, the Democratic presidential primary in New York on Feb. 5 is shaping up as the state’s most competitive since 1992, when Bill Clinton took up a rival’s mantra of change to all but cinch the nomination.

Mrs. Clinton was re-elected a little more than a year ago by better than two to one. Before the Iowa caucuses, she had so dominated opinion polls and endorsements by elected officials and powerful unions that many considered her home state impregnable to political interlopers.

But if Mr. Obama wins the South Carolina primary in two weeks, he could develop enough grass-roots support among young people, liberals and black voters in New York to pose a serious threat to her claim to the state’s rich delegate lode, allies of both candidates say.“The expectation is that Hillary should win in New York,” said Assemblyman Adam Clayton Powell IV of Harlem, an Obama supporter. “As you know, expectations don’t always translate into votes, and so we’re going to fight in New York.”

While Mrs. Clinton’s supporters say they are certain she will win the state and, with it, the bulk of its 281 delegates, they acknowledge that to keep Mr. Obama from running even a close second, she may have to invest more precious time and money here. Twenty-one other states, including New Jersey and Connecticut, also hold primaries on Feb. 5.

“Clearly they’re going to make a humongous effort to make sure that doesn’t happen,” said State Senator Bill Perkins of Harlem, an Obama supporter.

‘Emotion and racial pride’
“We’re not taking anything for granted,” said Blake Zeff, the Clinton campaign’s communications director in New York. Representative Charles B. Rangel of Harlem, one of Mrs. Clinton’s earliest supporters, predicted that she would do “extremely well — after all, she’s our ‘favorite daughter.’ She’s better known and she’s earned the right to our support.”
But, Mr. Rangel acknowledged, “Obama’s electric campaign will stimulate a big turnout.”

“Even though there’s no question in my mind that Hillary can do a better job, we’re dealing with a lot of emotion and racial pride, and he’s proven himself to be a credible candidate already,” Mr. Rangel said.

Measured by volunteers, phone banks, offices and other tangible signs statewide, the Clinton campaign appears better organized. She has the support of many members of Congress and the Legislature, as well as the backing of unions that are adept at turning out voters, including those representing teachers, building service workers and municipal employees.

Mr. Obama has been endorsed by a number of black elected officials in Harlem, southeast Queens and central Brooklyn, all bastions of Democratic voters. And in a particularly revealing gauge of his organizational strength, Mr. Obama is the only Democrat other than Mrs. Clinton to have full delegate slates in each of the state’s 29 Congressional districts, suggesting he may be competitive in areas outside New York City.

In the 2004 primary, nearly half the Democrats who voted were in New York City. Manhattan alone accounted for nearly one in five.