Fmr. Gov. Mike Huckabee (R-AR) and Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) have taken the lead among Iowans who say they “definitely” or “probably” will attend their respective party caucuses on January 3^rd, according to The Des Moines Register's latest poll.

This is the first time Obama has beaten Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) the Register's poll (28 percent vs. 25 percent). While Obama has gained 5 percentage points since the last poll in October, this latest result falls within the margin of error of ±4.4 percentage points so the difference between the two candidates is statistically insignificant. However, Hillary has cause for worry, reports the Register:

About 30% of Democratic caucusgoers viewed Sen. Clinton as either mostly or very unfavorably, behind Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio and former Alaska senator Mike Gravel. She topped the list of candidates whose nomination would be one of the biggest disappointments at 27%.

Considering that Fmr. Gov. Mitt Romney (R-MA) has spent something like $7 million to woo IA caucusgoers - compared to Huckabee’s paltry $300K - he’s the only candidate in either party who is more worried than Hillary right now. The five-point gap between Huckabee and Romney falls just outside the margin of error (29 percent vs. 24 percent). Notes the Register: “Huckabee has come a long way since last May, when he languished in a tie for sixth place in the Register's poll, garnering the support of just 4% of likely caucus participants then.” The New York Times observes:

If there was any doubt that Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign was seriously concerned about the threat posed to them by Mike Huckabee in Iowa, Mr. Romney’s latest campaign swing through the state surely erased that.

The shift in the dynamics of the race in just the last few weeks was palpable in a myriad of ways. There was the way Mr. Huckabee’s name kept coming up, even in questions from audience members for Mr. Romney throughout the day.

At one forum at a community college on Friday morning, questioners mentioned Mr. Huckabee, who had previously labored in obscurity in the state for months, three different times in the span of just a few minutes.

According to the Register’s poll, Huckabee is particularly strong amongst social conservatives – for instance, amongst self-identified born-again Christians, he is favored by 38 percent to Romney’s 22 percent. The Washington Post explains how he was able to get the most bang for the few bucks he had to spend in IA:

Randy Brinson … is the keeper of a massive e-mail list of … about 71 million contacts, with 25 million identified as belonging to "25 and 45 years old, upwardly mobile, right-of-center, conservative households," he said. …

How did a doctor from Alabama come to possess one of the most coveted lists in Republican politics? Brinson has actor/director Mel Gibson to thank for that one.

In February 2004, Brinson, who has worked on and off in politics for much of his life, was at a gathering of national religious broadcasters when he ran into a group of people doing the early marketing efforts for Gibson's film "The Passion of the Christ." …

Brinson had been noodling with ideas about how to build a list to reach the Christian community for the better part of a year and had even formed Redeem the Vote, a voter registration organization. The marketers coveted his know-how, and an alliance was born. …

Huckabee got involved with Redeem the Vote on the ground floor, agreeing to serve as the chairman of the organization's national advisory committee in 2004. …

In Iowa alone, Brinson's list has produced 414,000 contacts for the Huckabee campaign, a stunning number given that less than one-quarter of that total is expected to vote in January's Republican caucuses.

While Romney is no doubt surprised that Huckabee has lapped him, Obama may be surprised that he may not be the preferred candidate of minority voters and Clinton may be surprised that she may not be the preferred candidate of feminists.

The WaPo reports that black leaders are divided over whether they should throw their votes to Hillary, who is regarded as “electable,” or to Obama, who is the embodiment of the goals and aspirations of the civil rights movement:  

[T]he Clinton-Obama rivalry represents a moment of choice for the black political establishment that grew from the civil rights movement. With the African American vote potentially critical once the primary campaign extends beyond overwhelmingly white Iowa and New Hampshire, the divided loyalties are making for a complex landscape in heavily black states such as South Carolina, which will hold its primary Jan. 26, and Georgia and Alabama, which will vote Feb. 5.

As a recent op-ed in the Los Angeles Times points out, “animosity between Latinos and blacks is the worst-kept secret in race relations in America”:

Across the country - in Plainfield, N.J.; Jacksonville, Fla.; Annapolis, Md., and Indianapolis, Ind., among other places - the clash between black and brown has drawn attention, and lots of it, because it involves two groups that some think should be natural allies. At least that's what the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Cesar Chavez thought four decades ago. They had a mutual admiration society and passionately believed that blacks and Latinos were equally oppressed minorities and should march in lock step. "Our separate struggles are really one - a struggle for freedom, for dignity and for humanity," King wrote to Chavez in 1965. But that rhapsodic notion of black and brown harmony is now the faintest of faint memories. Three years ago, when the Census Bureau proclaimed Latinos the largest minority in the U.S., many blacks loudly grumbled that they would be shoved even further to the margin among minorities.

The hard feelings aside, why should Hispanic voters throw their support to Obama when one of their own – Gov. Bill Richardson (D-NM) - is also making his own historic run for the White House? These voters, too, may regard Hillary as being the most electable candidate, which puts their votes even more out of reach for Obama.

As for Hillary, her gender has not proved to be the overriding consideration amongst women voters and the Obama campaign is trying to leverage this ambivalence, reports The New York Times:

In the intensifying battle for the votes of Democratic women, Senator Barack Obama’s campaign is trying to turn years of feminist thinking on its head and argue that the best candidate for women may, in fact, be a man. …

Around the country, but especially in the early voting states, many of these women are engaged in a complicated conversation, with a hunger to make history often pushing them in one direction while more conventional considerations, like a candidate’s stand on the war in Iraq, pushing them in another. …

Kate Michelman, a senior adviser to the Edwards campaign and a longtime abortion rights leader, said she told women that Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy was historic and exciting, and that “we have spent a long time and traveled a long road to get to this point.” But she added, “That doesn’t bring us to the place where gender becomes the only thing or even the most important factor determining our decision.”

With just four weeks before the Iowa caucuses, in an intensely competitive battle against Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Edwards, the Obama campaign is ratcheting up its women’s effort. It is, in some ways, a strategic counterpoint to Mrs. Clinton’s wooing of black voters, a group that can be so important in some primaries and in the general election that she cannot afford to cede it to Mr. Obama just because he is black.

In a surprisingly lucid column, New York Times columnist Frank Rich nicely sums up the inside-out, upside-down, backasswards reality that has completely debunked conventional wisdom: “Election year isn’t even here yet, and already most of the first drafts penned by the political press have proved instantly disposable, from Fred Thompson’s irresistible Reaganesque star power to the Family Research Council’s ability to abort the rise of Rudy Giuliani. The biggest Beltway myth so far - that the Clinton campaign is ‘textbook perfect’ and ‘tightly disciplined’ - was surely buried for good by the undisciplined former president’s seemingly panic-driven blunder last week [Bill Clinton telling an IA audience that he had opposed the Iraq War ‘from the beginning’].”

Life Imitates Art

The Stiletto Scoops Dennis Kucinich

Have you ever noticed that presidential candidates Ron Paul (R-TX) and Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) sound like conjoined twins when it comes to the Iraq War (second item) and U.S. foreign policy? … His libertarian supporters insist that every breath Paul takes and every move he makes is within the scope and intent of the U.S. Constitution.

- Ron Paul Explains Why He Sounds Just Like Dennis Kucinich (second item), The Stiletto Blog, October 10, 2007

"I'm thinking about Ron Paul" as a running mate, Kucinich told a crowd of about 70 supporters … over the Thanksgiving weekend. … Paul communications director Jesse Benton said in an e-mail … "They have worked, and will continue to work, together on the ending the war and protecting civil liberties.” … Both frequently cite the Constitution as providing the authority for their agendas.

- If Kucinich Wins Nomination, Ron Paul Could Be His Veep, The Plain Dealer (Cleveland), November 25, 2007

The Other Shoe Drops: Updates To Previous Posts

† CAIR: OfficeMax Drops Ads On Michael Savage’s Radio Program Because He Is Anti-Muslim (second item): WorldNetDaily reports that radio talk show host Michael Savage has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against the Council on American-Islamic Relations CAIR). The complaint accuses CAIR of being a "political vehicle of international terrorism" that seeks to do "material harm to those voices who speak against the violent agenda of CAIR's clients."   

Savage is suing over audio clips CAIR has been using in a promotions and fundraising campaign, and seeks damages equal to proceeds raised from this use. The suit also maintains that Savage’s heartfelt rant echoes the feelings of many Americans:

"I'm not gonna put my wife in a hijab. And I'm not gonna put my daughter in a burqa. And I'm not getting' on my all-fours and braying to Mecca. And you could drop dead if you don't like it. You can shove it up your pipe. I don't wanna hear any more about Islam. I don't wanna hear one more word about Islam. Take your religion and shove it up your behind. I'm sick of you." …

"The audience of 'The Savage Nation' expects this type of from-the-heart outrage and when it is directed at a murderer such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his ilk, the piece is far more understandable and far more American mainstream. While the strength of the outrage is remarkable and a hallmark of 'The Savage Nation,' the sentiment is shared by a huge number of Americans," the lawsuit said.

"The copyright material properly viewed is a scream of outrage on behalf of the American public against beheadings, hangings of homosexuals, mutilation of women, the torture of rape victims and the thought that CAIR and other groups are trying to import these atrocities into American life," the lawsuit said.

This is not the first time that CAIR has tried to impose Islamofascist-style censorship on an American speaking his mind on American soil, and it’s not likely to be the last. Whatever one thinks of the way Savage expresses himself, Americans must defend his free speech rights.

† U.S. Businesses Gouge Americans, But Give Foreign Nationals A Better Deal (last item): The U.S. Treasury Department and a coalition of banks (among them, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, and Countrywide Financial), mortgage investors, nonprofits and consumer counseling groups are hammering out a plan to freeze subprime mortgage rates, or to allow homeowners who cannot make higher mortgage payments when rates reset in 2008 to refinance to fixed rate loans. Reports The Washington Post:

The agreement focuses on aiding many of the 2 million credit-challenged, or subprime, borrowers who, at the peak of the real estate boom in 2005 and 2006, bought houses with mortgages that offered low teaser rates that rise after the first two or three years of the loan. By the end of next year, about 500,000 people are expected to lose their homes because they cannot meet the new, higher monthly payments, federal housing officials said. …

Most borrowers with questionable credit got subprime rates of 7 to 8 percent in 2005 and 2006, federal housing officials said. When the rates reset, they could rise to 10 percent or more. An interest rate increase to 10 percent from 7 percent on a $200,000 loan increases monthly payments by more than $400, to $1,755 from $1,331.

Meanwhile, in a related development – Citigroup was hit particularly hard by the subprime crisis - Abu Dhabi is giving the troubled financial institution a $7.5 billion infusion of capital in return for a 4.9 percent stake. The Wall Street Journal doesn’t much care for the deal (subscription required):

[N]o one should be under any illusions that Abu Dhabi's investment is a normal commercial transaction. It comes from a sovereign wealth fund controlled by a foreign government, which has political as much as business interests; from an Arab government that has a troubling history with American banking laws; and it offers a Middle Eastern entree into the U.S. financial system that since 9/11 plays a pivotal role in the war on terror. …

Arab interests will now have inordinate sway over America's largest bank. Abu Dhabi's 4.9% stake combined with the 3.9% stake of Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal makes them the bank's dominant shareholders, and who knows how many other smaller holdings are in Middle Eastern hands. The small Gulf states may be governed separately from Saudi Arabia, but they are closely linked by geography, family ties, and national interests. For purposes of political influence, they often behave as part of the same tribe. …

The wire-transfer system is crucial in the war on terror, and at a minimum the Fed and U.S. Treasury need to know that Citigroup will continue to cooperate in sanctions against terror states and tracking terror financing. Citigroup's enforcement unit should be given a thorough scrubbing.

On the bright side, maybe Citi’s customers will now get treated to Muslim-style interest-free loans, mortgages and credit cards.

† Gonna Make You Sweat, Gonna Make You Groove (last item): Slogging through tedious trip down memory lane that starts when Los Angeles Times music critic Ann Powers was in high school, The Stiletto’s heart suddenly skips a beat. She reads the sentence again – and once more, just to make sure:

The three surviving members of Zep are reuniting for the first time in many years. At first they said they'd play just one show, as part of a tribute to the late Atlantic Records executive Ahmet Ertegun, in London on Dec. 10. But they've recorded a new song, and rumors are circulating about a possible U.S. tour.

The Stiletto would like to reassure her friend, The Heel (an Ivy-educated attorney with a prestigious New York firm and sometime contributor to The Stiletto Blog), that he can get by with one kidney.

† TB Or Not TB, That Is The Question (last item): Preliminary data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows that none of the U.S. passengers sharing a May 12 Air France flight from Atlanta to Paris with TB patient Andrew Speaker - including the 25 sitting in closest proximity to him – have tested positive for the infectious respiratory disease. The Public Health Agency of Canada, which followed the health status of the 29 passengers seated closest to Speaker on the May 24 Czech Air flight from Prague, Czech Republic, to Montreal, also found no evidence that the Atlanta attorney had spread the disease. Speaker tells The Associated Press that he hopes the test results give "a sense of peace and closure for the people who may have been concerned."