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."
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