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NASHUA, N.H.--With less than a day before New Hampshire's primary election, it's starting to get ugly here.

And no, we're not just talking about the warmer temperatures turning pristine white snow to gray slush. On Sunday evening, Hillary Clinton's campaign accused Barack Obama's operatives of violating New Hampshire law by dispatching prerecorded "robocalls" to folks on the federal "do not call" list.

Clinton's camp says the messages are also illegal because they fail to disclose they're associated with the Obama campaign--instead, implying they're sponsored by the Planned Parenthood of Northern New England--until 38 seconds into the message. Under state law, such identifications must occur within 30 seconds.

"I'm really disappointed, and I'm just very, very sad to see that these tactics are being adopted by another campaign here in this Democratic primary," Cathy Sullivan, the Clinton campaign's New Hampshire coordinator, said in a conference call with reporters.

Clinton representatives said they were tipped off to the potential infraction by two supporters who called the campaign and claimed they had received the calls despite being on the do-not-call list.

We received no immediate response from the Obama camp, but according to other news outlets, the campaign is dismissing the charges, calling them a sign of desperation on the part of Clinton, who is trailing the Illinois senator here in most recent polls.

"Our disclaimer absolutely complies with the federal law and our vendor has assured us that he scrubbed the list for people on the do-not-call registry," Ned Helms, Obama's New Hampshire campaign co-chairman, said in an e-mail published by the Associated Press. "If this call went to someone who should not have received it, we will make sure the vendor takes every step to make sure this doesn't happen again," Helms said, in an e-mail from the Obama campaign.

The campaign also claims New Hampshire's do-not-call law does not apply to "presidential preference primaries."

The use of the robocalls at all illustrates that despite the amount of attention that media has been giving to the Internet's prominence in this year's primary, more traditional forms of getting out the vote are still out in full force. Across New Hampshire on Monday, most of the major candidates are traveling to local eateries, schools, and cultural centers to take a last stab at swaying undecided voters to their sides.

The allegations arrive as a new USA Today-Gallup poll found Obama to be in the lead among candidates in Tuesday's contest, with 39 percent of the support, compared with Clinton's 29 percent. That contrasts with a poll released just before Saturday night's debates, in which Obama and Clinton were in a dead heat, with each candidate racking up 33 percent of local voters' backing.

Update at 11:08 a.m. PST: The same USA Today-Gallup poll from Monday, by the way, found Sen. John McCain leading former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney by 4 percentage points in the Republican race.

At the start of a new drive in New Hampshire ahead of Tuesday's primary, presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton addresses hundreds of supporters in a Nashua airplane hangar.

(Credit: Anne Broache/CNET News.com)

NASHUA, N.H.--In a new push to win over New Hampshire voters on Friday, Hillary Clinton highlighted a technological facet of her pledge to revamp the nation's healthcare system: ditch paper medical records.

Digitizing the vital documents will not only cut an estimated $77 billion in costs, but "much more important than that, we would save lives," the New York senator said Friday morning to a few hundred cheering, sign-waving supporters huddled around the stage in a drafty airplane hangar here.

Clinton's early-morning return to the Granite State, which is scheduled to hold its primary election Tuesday, followed a third-place finish in Iowa's first-in-the-nation contest on Thursday night. According to a Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby poll released on Friday, Clinton is currently leading the Democratic pack in the New Hampshire race, with 32 percent to Sen. Barack Obama's 26 percent.

Clad in a dark suit, Clinton touched on the economy ("it's going to be a tough economic year," she predicted, citing the most recent unemployment statistics) and her electability (she has the mettle to "withstand the Republican attack machine," she said) before taking questions from the audience.

Her pledge to create a nationwide, electronic health-record-keeping system came in response to a comment from an audience member who, by Clinton's description, "lost her daughter because her medical records were not readily available."

"We go online to buy things from Mongolia, we go online to do our banking, but we can't go online in a secure, encrypted, confidential way to get access to our medical records," she lamented.

Some hospitals and medical offices, of course, are already wired, but right now, most people aren't able to view their records electronically. Naturally, companies like Microsoft have been plotting ways to fill that void. At least one recent study found security and privacy vulnerabilities remain as e-health advocates forge ahead with their plans.

In any case, it's not a new idea on Clinton's part, as she has been working with other senators for years on passing legislation aimed at getting electronic medical records systems off the ground.

Nor is it a partisan issue. President Bush long called for greater computerization of health records, and former president Bill Clinton has also advocated for such action in recent months. (He, by the way, was on hand Friday to introduce his wife and daughter Chelsea, who made a smiling but silent appearance just before her mother's speech.)

In between discussion of health care, troop withdrawal from Iraq, and protecting manufacturing jobs within the United States, Clinton also revived talk of her previously-unveiled plans to enlist higher-tech alternatives in her energy policy.

As part of her push to wean the United States off foreign oil, Clinton vowed again to yank subsidies from oil companies and to require them to pay into a "Strategic Energy Fund" that will bankroll research on new technologies and clean, renewable energy sources.

"We're serious this time," she said. "America is really serious."

Making buildings greener is key to fighting climate change, Clinton told a packed audience.

(Credit: Gregory Wenzel)

CHICAGO--Fighting climate change requires making the nation's homes, offices, and schools healthier and more energy efficient, former president Bill Clinton told thousands attending the Greenbuild conference on Wednesday. Sweeping efforts to reduce the carbon footprints of buildings, which emit three-quarters of most cities' greenhouse gases, can measurably benefit the environment, he said.

"The sale's been made," Clinton said. "Otherwise Al Gore wouldn't have gotten the Nobel Prize. Now what we have to do is...to prove that this is not a big bottle of castor oil that we're being asked to drink."

To that end, the Clinton Climate Initiative has been engaging businesses and leaders of 40 cities to plot ways to reduce carbon emissions. The project launched in August 2006 as part of the William J. Clinton Foundation.

"This is the biggest economic opportunity that our country has had to mobilize and democratize economic opportunity since World War II," he said.

In partnership with Clinton's effort, GE Real Estate announced on Wednesday that it will "green" all of its operations, which comprise $72 billion worth of assets and 385 million square feet of property in 31 countries.

Clinton also announced efforts to help make the nation's schools more sustainable by retrofitting existing buildings to use less energy and fewer hazardous materials. A quarter of American students attend school in dangerous buildings, but renovations can save money and create long-term health and educational benefits, he said.

Clinton noted the efforts of Arne Duncan, CEO of the Chicago Public Schools, and other school leaders from around the country who joined him onstage. Chicago is retrofitting all of its schools to attain certification through Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. LEED ratings are run by the nonprofit U.S. Green Building Council, which produces Greenbuild. Other speakers lauding the benefits of sustainable design noted that there are more LEED-certified prisons than schools.

Audience members swarmed Clinton as he left the stage.

(Credit: Gregory Wenzel)

Clinton insisted that the United States and emerging superpowers should embrace a successor to the Kyoto Protocol by 2010. Clinton blamed the failure of Kyoto in the United States on both Congress and the Bush administration.

"If the coming giants India and China and those coming behind them--Vietnam Ukraine, all these emerging countries--if they insist on the old industrial society's patterns of energy use, it is true that the most calamitous consequences of climate change will occur," he said.

"We have no idea what we can do in terms of reducing greenhouse gases because we just got started."

Small donors are having a significant impact on the amount of money that the Republican and Democratic candidates for president are raising. The Internet, providing the tools for grassroots activists to self-organize and conduct "p-commerce" by giving political money online, has clearly contributed to this.

The interesting story after six months of presidential fund-raising is that some candidates, notably Barack Obama, are doing much better at reaching small donors than others.

In a July 3 CNET post on what the Internet has done for presidential campaign fund-raising, I wrote, "the story technophiles should celebrate and fear how the Internet has enabled such an extraordinary, incredible, surprising increase in dollars (raised by candidates running for president). The Internet has created a new paradigm, connecting once-dormant activists to politics and telling them how important money is to victory."

An even deeper look, comparing the leading presidential candidates from both parties, shows that some have mastered the art of the small donor ($200 or less) better than others. Obama is the leader here, just as he is winning the overall nomination fund-raising fight for both the Democrats and Republicans.

The Campaign Finance Institute, which reviews the legally required raising and spending reports for each candidate, has crunched lots of numbers. Here's a bit of what the numbers reveal:

First, Obama has benefited much more than fellow Democrat Hillary Clinton from smaller donors. This probably shows a breadth of voter support among Democratic activists that Clinton either does not have or has not yet tapped into. This also means that Obama has a larger base of small givers to whom he can return for another installment (that means more cash), and it might mean that he has a grassroots movement that is larger and even more energized than Clinton's.

Obama has received more than $16 million in donations of $200 or less (29 percent of his total), while Clinton has received only $4 million in similar-size donations (10 percent of her total). Even John Edwards has beaten her with $5 million in small donations (24 percent of this total).

The leading Republicans (Romney and Giuliani) did far worse than the leading Democrats in raising smaller donations. Romney's small-donor percentage was 9 percent, and Giuliani's was 6 percent. Not coincidentally, they have raised less money, partly because they have appeared to focus fund-raising only from big donors. The Cadillac market must just be more their style than the Chevrolet set.

Second, despite the huge numbers of small-dollar donors, most money still comes from larger donors ($1,000 to the legal limit of $2,300). Even Obama's phenomenal "grassroots" fund-raising ($200 and less) has not cut too much into his reliance on larger donors. He has gathered 71 percent of his money from the larger donors. But compared to Giuliani, Romney and Clinton--who got 80 percent to 90 percent of their money from the larger donors--Obama is downright dirty in the grassroots fund-raising realm.

What conclusions can be drawn from these small-dollar versus big-dollar comparisons? There is a lot of money to be made by having an energized group of supporters who are willing to give smaller dollars. Any candidate who doesn't have a grassroots base of activists or who chooses not to approach them for contributions puts herself or himself at a serious disadvantage over time.

Further, technology, including the ability to self-organize over the Internet and to contribute online, has clearly factored in the rise in donations, especially the ones less than $200.

Finally, contributors represent one subset of overall voter support. Perhaps Obama's ability to get so many people to write small checks tells a different story from the one believed by the national political press corps and many weavers of conventional wisdom --that Clinton is the inevitable nominee for the Democrats. We'll know for sure in about seven months, when the first nominating elections begin happening.

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Campaign Finance Institute
Daily Kos: Small Dollars and Max Donors, Part II