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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tonto who wrote (521515)	1/9/2004 7:37:01 AM
From: tonto	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

DES MOINES, Iowa (Reuters) - Democrat Richard Gephardt's manager accused Howard Dean's presidential campaign on Thursday of planning to slip non-Iowans into the Jan. 19 caucuses to pose as state residents and support Dean. Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi denied the allegation and told Gephardt manager Steve Murphy "sleazy tactics like yours are exactly the reason that people have stopped participating in the political process." In a letter to Trippi and later in a conference call with reporters, Murphy said a Dean field organizer in Iowa told a Gephardt staff member some of the expected 3,500 out-of-state Dean supporters coming to Iowa to help turn out the caucus vote would try to participate. "It has come to our attention that your campaign in Iowa is engaged in an effort to violate caucus rules and send out-of-state supporters to pose as Iowa residents and caucus in cities and towns across the state," Murphy said in the letter. He told reporters the effort was "a direct challenge to the integrity of the caucuses" and called on Trippi to identify and fire the individuals responsible for it. Murphy said the Gephardt campaign, in a must-win battle with front-runner Dean in Iowa, planned to step up its monitoring of caucus participants and had asked the state party to be particularly vigilant. Participants in the caucuses, sponsored by the state Democratic Party, must be registered Democrats who will be old enough to vote in November, but they can register on the spot and identification or proof of residence is not required. As a party event, Murphy said, there is no legal penalty attached to the fraud and he said he would not challenge the results if Gephardt lost. The possibility of such an effort surfaced in November, when state party officials sent an advisory to the campaigns warning against the tactic after a Dean staff member in Vermont called and asked if a hotel address was sufficient grounds to participate. At the time, Dean officials dismissed the significance of the call and attributed it to a teen-age intern. 'RIDICULOUS' CHARGE Trippi, who worked for Gephardt in 1988 as a deputy campaign manager, said the latest charge was "ridiculous" and that "people are tired of this type of campaigning." Sneaking out-of-staters into a caucus in some towns could be difficult, as all participants meet publicly to declare their preferences, leaving strangers vulnerable to exposure. Murphy said some precincts have hundreds of participants and a fraudulent voter could blend in. The allegations came as some of the nine Democrats vying for the right to challenge President Bush touted their proposals for middle-class tax relief, drawing a contrast with plans by Dean and Gephardt to repeal all of Bush's tax cuts, including those on middle and lower-income families. Gephardt defended his plan, saying the savings would go to pay for his health care proposal that would ultimately save middle-class families more. "Some in this race are promising to preserve some large part of the Bush tax cut. I think retaining a large part of a failure is still a failure," said Gephardt, who campaigned across eastern and central Iowa. During a campaign stop where he met with three families who would benefit from his tax proposals, Democrat John Edwards said he was surprised that Dean was preparing a new plan that would give tax relief to the middle class. "It's amazing what politicians will do when the election's approaching," the North Carolina senator told reporters in Manchester, New Hampshire, when asked about Dean. Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry brought his crusade against corporate greed to a college students' convention in Manchester, winning loud applause by repeating his vow to close corporate tax loopholes. "We're going to scour the tax code of our country and we're not going to leave one loophole, one reward, one incentive for any Benedict Arnold company or CEO that take their money and jobs overseas," Kerry said.