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A top foreign policy adviser to Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama resigned Friday after she referred to rival Hillary Clinton as a monster.  VOA National correspondent Jim Malone has the latest on an increasingly bitter campaign for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination.

Samantha Power is a foreign policy expert and a professor at Harvard University in Masschusetts.

Power had been advising Barack Obama, but quit on Friday after a Scottish newspaper quoted her as describing Hillary Clinton as a monster.

In her resignation statement, Power expressed regret for her comment and said she had often expressed admiration for Senator Clinton in the past.

Power’s comment came to light after a top aide to Senator Clinton, Howard Wolfson, compared Senator Obama to Ken Starr, the special prosecutor who carried out a lengthy and controversial investigation of the Clinton White House during the 1990s.  That comment offended some Obama supporters.

Hillary Clinton speaking in Washington, 06 Mar 2008

The increasingly negative tone of the campaign comes as Clinton attempts to portray Obama as too inexperienced in foreign policy and national security matters.

“National security will be front and center in this election,” she said.  “We all know that.  And I think it is imperative that each of us demonstrate that we can cross the commander in chief threshold.”

Obama continues to hold a delegate lead of about 100 over Clinton, despite Clinton winning three of four primaries last Tuesday, including the large states of Ohio and Texas.

Obama told ABC News his campaign may be more aggressive in responding to the Clinton attacks.  He also said the message of his three losses on Tuesday may be that he needs to work harder in the upcoming primary and caucus contests.

Democratic presidential nomination hopeful Barack Obama speaks during a town hall meeting in Casper, Wyoming, 7 Mar 2008

“People started saying, well, maybe we want this to continue a little further,” he said.  “They want me to earn this thing and not feel as if I am just sliding into it.”

Wyoming holds a Democratic caucus on Saturday and Mississippi holds a primary on Tuesday.  But the next big battle looming is the Pennsylvania primary on April 22.  Clinton is favored in Pennsylvania, but a new poll shows Obama has cut into her lead there.

Meanwhile, the presumptive Republican nominee, Senator John McCain of Arizona, is focused on unifying his party and beginning the process of choosing a vice presidential running mate.

McCain campaigned in Georgia Friday and reminded his audience that his support for the military surge policy in Iraq stands in sharp contrast to the troop withdrawal plans put forward by Obama and Clinton.

“My Democratic friends said they want to set a date for withdrawal.  That is a date for surrender,” he said.  “That is date where al-Qaida would announce they have defeated the United States of America.”

McCain also told supporters that tax cuts and job retraining are keys to bolstering the weakening U.S. economy.  Concern over the economy now ranks as the number one issue for U.S. voters in the campaign.

As presidential contests gets underway in four states, Clinton greets voters in Houston and Obama visits a livestock show. McCain plans victory party in Dallas.

By Louise Roug, Scott Martelle and Maria L. LaGanga

Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton, hoping for a comeback in her presidential race against rival Barack Obama, greeted voters at polling places this morning in Houston and Dallas before leaving Texas to await election results in Columbus, Ohio.

“I feel really good about today,” the New York senator told reporters outside a Houston elementary school . “Let’s wait and see what the voters have actually decided — I think it’s going to turn out well.”

Obama, a freshman senator from Illinois who is hoping to extend his string of 11 victories and deliver a knockout punch to Clinton’s campaign, began his day at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo in Houston. He looked at cows and bulls, shook hands with high schoolers with the Future Farmers of America and donned a green-and-yellow John Deere baseball cap. He planned broadcast interviews today and a San Antonio rally this evening..

“I hope we do well, but we’re working hard,” he told reporters.

With 370 pledged delegates at stake in today’s contests in Ohio, Rhode Island, Texas and Vermont, voters were turning out in record numbers. Voters in Ohio faced raw, late-winter weather, including freezing rain in the north and flood warnings or watches across most of the state.

But the weather did little to dampen early turnout, with one small precinct in a Columbus neighborhood attracting a steady stream of voters, including Kevin Frazier, a 45-year-old nurse technician. Once in the camp of former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina because of his focus on poverty, Frazier said he voted for Obama.

“Hillary Clinton, she voted with Bush too much for me,” he said. “She did a lot of things for kids and tried to do the universal healthcare … but she never looked at the full picture.”

Clinton, hoping to rejuvenate her campaign and keep the contest going to the Pennsylvania primary on April 22, gave television interviews to stations in all the major media markets in the voting states. In job-strapped Ohio, she bashed Obama for his supposed back-signal to Canadians over the North American Free Trade Agreement. In border-conscious Texas, she talked tough about Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez.

Speaking to several stations in Dayton, Clinton said, “Sen. Obama came to Ohio and said one thing about NAFTA and then had a foreign government told something else,” she told WKEF/WRGT. Later, talking to the Spanish-language Telemundo, Clinton said, “President Chavez has taken actions that are very dangerous. … For the life of me, why Hugo Chavez would side with the terrorists is inexplicable.”

Later, talking to reporters, Clinton said, “You don’t get to the White House without winning Ohio.” She added that her campaign also hopes to “put Texas in play.”

Putting Texas in play is complicated by the state’s two-stage voting process some are calling “the Texas two-step.” After the polls close there, voters who cast a primary ballot are eligible to participate in a caucus that will decide roughly a third of the state’s 228 delegates.

On the Republican side, Arizona Sen. John McCain has scheduled a victory party for Dallas today, hoping his combined wins in the four states will give him the 159 delegates he needs to clinch the GOP nomination.

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, in an interview on CNN, said he is still hoping for a win in Texas.

Noting dryly that McCain, who spent the weekend at home in Arizona, has “been on vacation,” Huckabee told CNN, “We think in an election anything can happen.”

Asked whether the mathematics suggests he should drop out of the race, Huckabee, the choice of hard-core conservatives displeased by McCain’s stances on immigration and campaign-reform policies, said he sees no reason to withdraw before one candidate has received the 1,191 delegates needed to win the nomination.

“It would be nice to get to that point before we drain the bathtub,” he said.

By Robert Schroeder

WASHINGTON  Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama grabbed a wide lead over rival Sen. Hillary Clinton in polls taken just ahead of Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary, with Sen. John McCain edging out Mitt Romney on the Republican side.

Just a day before the critical, first-in-the-nation primary, Obama was pulling in 39% of the vote in a new Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby poll, versus Clinton’s 29%. Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards finished third with 19% of the vote. In a separate USA Today/Gallup poll, Obama took a 13 percentage-point advantage over Clinton.

Meanwhile, the Reuters poll shows Arizona Sen. McCain with a five-point lead over ex-Massachusetts Gov. Romney, leading the former governor 34% to 29%. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who won the Iowa Republican caucus, dropped back to third place in the poll, at 10%. He was one percentage point ahead of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. McCain is also leading Romney by 4% in the USA Today poll.

Both the Republican and Democratic presidential contenders spent Saturday in fierce debates with each other in New Hampshire as they sought to convince voters there to choose them.

Romney and McCain clashed over the role of drug companies in the U.S. health-care system. McCain criticized the sector, while Romney replied: “Don’t turn the pharmaceutical companies into the big, bad guys.”

The Republican candidates also disagreed significantly over how to deal with millions of illegal immigrants living in the U.S. Giuliani said he would focus on illegal immigrants who have committed crimes, while Romney said there should be no special pathway to permanent residency or citizenship for illegals.

Clinton and Obama argued over their own health-care proposals, with Clinton charging Obama with inconsistency on the issue. Obama doesn’t believe a mandate for buying health insurance is necessary. The cost of insurance is what keeps people from buying it, he said.

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) - The battle for the Democratic presidential nomination remains a close-fought battle, with a new poll showing Barack Obama even with Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire.

A Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll shows Obama, the Illinois senator, with the support of 32% of New Hampshire Democrats. Clinton had the support of 30%, making for a statistical dead heat. New Hampshire holds its Democratic and Republican primaries on Jan. 8.

The survey showed Obama making great strides since the fall. A September Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll showed him trailing the New York senator 35% to 16%.

In Iowa, the poll found that Clinton, Obama and John Edwards, the former North Carolina senator and 2004 vice presidential nominee, were locked in a three-way statistical tie. The results echoed other surveys that show the candidates virtually deadlocked in Iowa, which kicks off the presidential contests with Democratic and Republican caucuses on Jan. 3.

The survey, however, found that Clinton may stand to benefit from the fallout surrounding the assassination of former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto on Thursday, the Los Angeles Times reported.

The survey found that Iowa and New Hampshire Democrats, as well as Democrats around the country, see Clinton as better able to handle national security than Obama, the Times said.

Sen. John McCain of Arizona enjoys a similar advantage among Republican voters. The poll found that Republicans in New Hampshire and Iowa consider him the best qualified to deal with foreign affairs.

Meanwhile, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee holds a lead of 37% to 23% over former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in Iowa, the poll found. Huckabee has seen support surge in recent weeks, displacing Romney, who had held a strong lead in Iowa for several months.