Heading into the last weekend before Monday's Iowa caucuses, and the race between the four leading contenders seems too close to call after surges in support for Kerry and Edwards.

Dean, meanwhile, thinks Gephardt's latest medicare attack ad is "hooey".

Monday's vote in Iowa takes place on Martin Luther King day, and Carol Moseley Braun invoked the civil rights leaders as she called it a campaign and gave her backing to Dean. "When women run, when people of color run, we open up the possibility that women and people of color can win," she said, announcing her endorsement of Dean.

Over and above the difficulties of campaigning in an overwhelmingly white state (although Rev Jesse Jackson polled particularly well there when he sought the Democratic nomination in 1988), Moseley Braun was fighting a losing battle when it came to fundraising.

The Democratic candidates have so far spent a total of $21m on television ads, according to a study by a group from the University of Wisconsin.

From new year's day to January 9th, the study shows, more than 3,000 political ads have aired in the state of Iowa. By the time the state votes on Monday, the Democratic candidates will have spent roughly $100 for every caucus-goer, the study finds.

The truly big money-earner, though, - literally the elephant in the room - President Bush will be sending some high level supporters to Iowa and New Hampshire to fly the Republican flag and make sure the administration's message dosen't get swamped among the Democrats' partying.

Among those out stumping for the president? his nemesis from the 2000 primary campaign John McCain, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, and, er, Jim Nussle.

The Democrats, meanwhile, are expected to debate at Dartmouth College on January 25th.

Whatever the 'protest primary' in Washington DC hoped to achieve, the 45,000 or so people who showed up on Wednesday, about 15 per cent of eleigible voters, gave the "win" to Howard Dean. The district's 16 convention delegates will be assigned at a caucus on Feb 14th.

Al Sharpton came second - quite possibly the last time you'll see those words in the same sentence for the rest of the campaign.

The Dean campaign's latest ad, highlighting where the other Democrats stood on the war in Iraq, gives a free ride to Gen Wesley Clark, who's sitting out Iowa - where as many as 18 per cent of potential voters may be still undecided - but is closing on Dean in New Hampshire.

Dick Gephardt, meanwhile, was presenting the 'Top Ten Signs You've Been on the Campaign Trail Too Long' on The Late Show With David Letterman.

The candidates got a little edgy with other in Sunday night's final debate.

The 'Brown and Black' forum in Des Moines dealt primarily with issues of race, and Al Sharpton attacked frontrunner Howard Dean over his record of appointing minorities to his cabinet while he was Governor of Vermont.

"It seems as though you discovered blacks and browns during this campaign," the always-entertaining Sharpton said. With Iowa's voters overwhelmingly white, the remarks were probably intended more for consumption in South Carolina, another early battleground state, which holds its primary on February 3rd.

Dean's responded by returning to his key messages, for instance: "We need to talk about health insurance, because there are 102,000 kids with no health insurance in South Carolina; half of them are white, half of them are black".

While Dennis Kucinich recalled images of Ross Perot by holding up a pie-chart at every opportunity - something he inexplicably did on an NPR radio interview ast week - John Kerry tried to invoke the spirit of Bill Clinton by striding purposefully from behind his podium to make a point, but succeeded only in walking out of the spotlight. No metaphor there, then....

On a serious note, while most of the exchanges were on domestic policy issues, there was more fallout from former Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill's claims that the Bush administration had decided almost as soon as the inauguration was over that Saddam Hussein would be removed from power. When the issue was raised - by Kucinich - it drew applause from the audience.

Similar enthusiasm greeted Kerry's, closing remarks on foreign policy, when he said:

"We have to prove to America that we can keep this country safe, because George Bush plans to run on national security.

I know something about aircraft carriers for real, my friends.

And if he wants national security to be the centerpiece of this campaign, I have three words for him that I know he understands: Bring it on."

The White House's response to the O'Neill story?

'We're not in the business of book reviews'.......

One week until the Iowa caucuses, and things are getting tighter. Dan Balz in the Washington Post sets the scene.

The press needs the ongoing excitement of a horse-race, so dosen't want the annointing of the Democratic candidate before a vote has been cast.

Howard Dean's lead is narrowing. But that dosen't seem to be a direct result of his remarks on a Canadian show four years ago, when he appeared to disparage the caucus process.

There's a good, meaty profile of Dean and what drives him in the New Yorker .

Steve

Tomorrow sees the announcement of the winner of the "Bush in 30 Seconds" political ad contest, run by MoveOn.org.

The contest was somewhat overshadowed by the furore surrounding one of the entries - the infamous 'Bush as Hitler' morph - which didn't make the final selection. Here's Fox News's take, and here's MoveOn's riposte.

'60 Minutes' has an interview with Paul O'Neill around the new book the former treasury secretary has written with Ron Suskind, in which he says that the Bush White House decided, almost as soon as the inauguration was over, that Saddam would be deposed.

"It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying ‘Go find me a way to do this,’" says O’Neill. “For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap.”

The problem is, as we were saying over brunch today, that the vast majority of people just flat out don't care.

The Des Moines Register, Iowa's biggest paper, has endorsed John Edwards, praising :

'.... his trial-lawyer skill for distilling arguments into compelling language that moves a jury of ordinary people. He speaks of there being two Americas:

"One America does the work, while another America reaps the reward. One America pays the taxes, while another America gets the tax breaks. If we want America to be a growing, thriving democracy with the strongest middle class on Earth, we must choose a different path."

If Edwards wins the Democratic nomination, voters this fall would have a choice between two men who almost perfectly embody the rival political philosophies in America today. George W. Bush and John Edwards are attractive, likable, energetic. They have about the same level of prior experience in government - and they are polar opposites."

The Iowa City Press-Citizen, on the other hand, throws its weight behind John Kerry, who this week picked up the endorsement of Ted Kennedy. Kerry was also the guest on Meet The Press on Sunday, when he said if Dean were the nominee, he would have a tough time in the general election against Bush.

[It's] going to be very difficult for a person in a post-September 11 world, who has no foreign policy experience, no national security experience, no military experience, very difficult to stand up against a wartime president and convince America that that person has the ability to make our country safe.


The man who has closed the gap on Dean to two points, Dick Gephardt, the former House minority leader from the neighbouring state of Missouri, won the Iowa caucuses in 1988 before eventually watching Michael Dukakis seal the nomination.

And this time round Gephardt and Dean are scrapping for the support of organised labour, with Dean wooing the white-collar unions and Gephardt winning the backing of the old-line activists.

Ironically, Dean's campaign manager, Joe Trippi, credited largely with masterminding Dean's groundbreaking internet strategy, was advising Gephardt in the '88 race.

Because of how Iowa's caucus system works, if the turnout this time is as high, particularly among new voters, and the margin as close between the front two as many expect , the key could end up being supporters of other candidates who have Dean or Gephardt as their second choice.