The Big Story: Outside groups, candidates target voters with messages

WASHINGTON, D.C. — While Republican Mike Huckabee wishes voters Merry Christmas in a television ad, a group organized by his supporters makes automated phone calls slipping the knife into his opponents.

John Edwards, lagging behind his Democratic rivals in cash, gets more than a million dollars in help from labor unions running parallel campaigns.

And Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is locked in a tight race in Iowa, has well-organized and highly strategic assistance from labor backers and EMILY’s List, the pro-abortion rights fundraising group that aims to help female candidates.

Presidential candidates are benefiting, and sometimes being criticized, by independent groups that are only now beginning to make their presence known in the early contest states of Iowa and New Hampshire. These groups can be more targeted, more negative and can coordinate their activities in ways that candidate campaigns cannot.

At the same time, the contenders themselves are operating on parallel tracks. Republican candidates in particular are stuffing mailboxes with negative messages about their rivals while airing cheery holiday greetings on television.

Mitt Romney has been especially prolific with negative mail. One piece portrays Fred Thompson as having a “do nothing record” on immigration and characterizes his other rivals, John McCain, Huckabee and Rudy Giuliani, as too lenient toward illegal immigrants.

In one brochure mailed in Iowa, Thompson criticizes the economic policies of Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor with this: “Mike Huckabee talks like a Republican but taxes like a Democrat.” Clinton and Barack Obama have exchanged mail over their health care plans.

The mixed messages have their purposes. Negative television can damage both the source and the target. Negative mailings can be aimed at supporters and at voters with a specific gripe.

Besides negative ads and mailings, campaigns and their supporters can spread more scurrilous attacks through the Internet, using blogs, e-mails and Web gossip sites such as the Drudge Report.

Outside groups often have been more likely to go on the air with negative advertising. But for the most part, they too have been targeted with their attacks, if they attack at all.

The Club for Growth, which advocates fiscal conservatism, appears to be an exception for now, running television ads against Huckabee. A conservative political action committee called RightMarch.com has spent about $330,000 in mailings and phone calls against Clinton.