LITTLE ROCK — Barack Obama will mark this week's round of primary voting with a rally in Iowa, where victory in January propelled him to his status as the front-runner.
In announcing the event, his aides described Iowa as "a critical general election state that Democrats must win in November."
Tuesday's primaries are in Kentucky, where polls show Hillary Rodham Clinton well ahead, and in Oregon, where Obama has the advantage.
With a solid lead in Democratic National Convention delegates - he picked up the endorsement of a Maryland superdelegate Saturday - Obama in recent days has spent more time focused on his differences with presumptive Republican nominee John McCain than sparring with Clinton.
On Saturday, he met with nurses at Sacred Heart Medical Center in Eugene, Ore., then returned to the foreign-policy debate he launched Friday. Both President Bush and McCain have suggested that Democrats can't be trusted to be tough on terrorists.
"The other side is going to keep calling us the same names, making the same cheap shots, using the same fear tactics they've used for the last four decades," Obama told about 1,400 people at a high school in Roseburg, Ore.
"If you agree that we've had a great foreign policy over the last eight years, then you should vote for John McCain, you shouldn't vote for me," Obama said.
McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds said Obama's foreign policy shows "incredibly weak judgment. We're a nation rooted in a history of sacrifice and achievement, not in lofty campaign rhetoric or campaign promises."
Obama is heading to Florida this week - a key general-election state in which he has not yet campaigned.
Iowa has been a swing state in recent elections. Democrat Al Gore narrowly carried the state in 2000, and President Bush collected the state's seven electoral votes by just more than 10,000 votes in 2004. Since that time, however, Democrats have built a substantial edge in registered voters, and turnout in the January caucuses was atrecord levels.
CLINTON STUMPS IN KENTUCKY
Clinton began a three-day swing through Kentucky with a tour of the Maker's Mark distillery in Loretto. Wearing gloves and safety goggles, she joined the assembly line to dip a bottle of bourbon in Maker's trademark red wax coating.
"There are some people who have been saying for months that this is over, and every time they say it, the voters come back and say, 'Oh no, it's not, we're not ready for it to be over,"' Clinton said on a stage in front of a stack of whiskey barrels. "You don't quit on people, and you don't quit until you finish what you started, and you don't quit on America."
Clinton had two more stops scheduled Saturday, all on just a few hours of sleep after a redeye flight from Portland, Ore., that landed at 5 a.m.
HUCKABEE WRITES 6TH BOOK
The book Mike Hucakbee is writing, his sixth, will be part campaign memoir, part plan for the future, he told Newsweek's Matthew Philips in an interview posted to the magazine's Web site.
"It's a bit of both," the former Arkansas governor said. "Inmany ways, it's how the future of the conservative movement can learn from what we saw on the campaign trail and what we saw from the grass-roots effort. The conventional wisdom has been that it's all about the money, but we shattered that.
"To me, that's the most important lesson that came out of the process: that it's about the message and moving people through that message, and that ordinary people who can't write the biggest checks and have never been invited to sit among the swells, that they can have just as much an impact as anyone."
Huckabee says he writes every day, with the goal of finishing two or three chapters a week.
"It's good and bad, because it does force you to write - being on deadline - but you also wake up every morning in a panic, thinking of how many pages you have to write that day."
Meanwhile, the Web was alive Friday night with criticism of Huckabee's "offhand remark" to a National Rifle Association audience. More than one blogger contended the former Arkansas governor had ruined his chance of being named McCain's running mate.
Reacting to an offstage noise during his speech, Huckabee said: "That was Barack Obama. He just tripped off a chair. He's getting ready to speak, and somebody aimed a gun at him and he - he dove for the floor."
Huckabee later apologized.
Bob Barr, who hopes to run for president on the Libertarian Party's ticket, issued a statement calling Huckabee's words "reckless, callous and harmful to the sports men and women of America and to those of us who fully support the Second Amendment."
The subject is likely to come up this morning, when Huckabee appears on NBC's Meet the Press.
BUSH TO LEND CAMPAIGN HAND
A May 27 fundraiser at the Phoenix Convention Center will mark President Bush's first appearance at a McCain campaign event, Politico.com reports.
The next day, Bush will be in Utah for a reception in Salt Lake City and a dinner ($70,100 a couple) at Mitt Romney's Park City home, the political Web site says. McCain won't be along.
Bush and McCain have not appeared together since March 5, when McCain visited the White House after clinching the Republican nomination the day before.
Information for this article was contributed by Mike Glover and Sara Jugler of The Associated Press and John McCormick of The Baltimore Sun.
Front Section, Pages 16 on 05/18/2008