Associated Press
NEW YORK – Warning that her campaign needs “a new approach to winning,” Hillary Rodham Clinton’s deputy campaign manager wrote a memo this week urging the Democratic front-runner to bypass next year’s Iowa caucuses to focus time and money on states where she’s faring better.
Her advisers fearing backlash from Iowa Democrats who cast the first votes of the 2008 presidential race, Clinton denounced the memo hours after it leaked from her headquarters and played down an internal debate over campaign strategy.
“I am unalterably committed to competing in Iowa,” she told The Associated Press.
The memo from Mike Henry emerged days after a Des Moines Sunday Register poll of likely caucus-goers showed Clinton trailing rivals John Edwards and Barack Obama in Iowa, which is to hold its caucuses Jan. 14, 2008.
“I believe we need a new approach to winning the Democratic nomination,” Henry wrote. “This approach involves shifting the focus away from Iowa and running a campaign that is more focused on other early primary states and winning this new national primary.”
All the major presidential campaigns have been struggling to adapt to next year’s vastly accelerated calendar, with such states as California and New York holding primaries within weeks of Iowa and the other traditional small state powerhouse, New Hampshire.
Clinton is under extra pressure now that Obama and Edwards threaten her strategy to project herself as the inevitable nominee.
That image is most fragile in Iowa, which Henry called “our consistently weakest state.”
Polls throughout the year in Iowa have generally shown Edwards topping the Democratic field, even as Clinton has led in national polls and most other state surveys. Privately, Clinton advisers, including former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, have acknowledged that she would probably not win Iowa if the election were held anytime soon.
– Associated Press