Candidates hammer home message in Iowa

By Carey Gillam

BURLINGTON, Iowa (Reuters) - White House hopefuls hammered home their closing messages on Saturday in a frenzied hunt for votes in Iowa, with Democrat Barack Obama promising a new kind of politics and rival Hillary Clinton proclaiming her readiness to lead.

Republican Mitt Romney took more swipes at rival John McCain, Mike Huckabee criticized Romney's attack ads and Rudy Giuliani made a last visit to the Midwestern U.S. state five days before it opens the race to pick candidates in the November 2008 election to succeed President George W. Bush.

Polls show both the Democratic and Republican races remain close and unpredictable in Iowa, where a strong showing can give candidates valuable momentum going into other state contests starting with New Hampshire just five days later.

Clinton, Obama and John Edwards are in a tight three-way battle among Democrats, with some polls showing Edwards gaining ground. Romney and Huckabee are fighting for the lead among Republicans, but up to one-fifth of the state's voters in both parties could still change their minds, according to polls.

In caravans of buses and vans, candidates rolled across Iowa's snowy roads and visited small towns in all corners of the state to plead for support.

Obama, a first-term Illinois senator who has faced charges of inexperience, stuck to his message that he was the candidate best suited to change Washington's way of doing business.

"We can't settle for the same old politics anymore. We need a fundamentally new kind of politics," Obama told the crowd in Burlington, a mixture of young college students and gray-haired men gripping canes.

Obama's camp also kept up its criticism of the influx of big spending into Iowa by outside groups supporting Clinton and Edwards, particularly a group headed by a former Edwards aide.

Obama campaign manager David Plouffe said in a statement Edwards had "exploited the biggest loophole in the campaign finance system" to benefit from the arrangement while taking public matching funds.

Edwards, who touts his refusal to take money from lobbyists, says he did not coordinate with the group and promised he would ban corporate lobbyists from working in his White House. "We will not replace corporate Republicans with corporate Democrats," he said in Washington, Iowa.

Clinton, a New York senator and former first lady, said in Eldridge, Iowa, there were two questions facing voters in the final days of the state's race.

READY ON DAY ONE

"Who is ready to be president on day one, to take responsibility for the serious issues that our country faces, and who can run a winning campaign to make sure that the Democrats take back the White House?" she asked.

"I'm very comfortable with Iowans answering those questions and coming out to caucus for me," Clinton said.

Former President Bill Clinton, campaigning for his wife in New Hampshire, said she was best qualified to deal with any unexpected crisis.