The much anticipated Iowa poll is out (GOP write up here, Dem write up here), and contrary to other recent polls, it contains some much needed good news for Barack Obama. Obama has picked up four points in the new poll vs one month ago while Clinton and Edwards remained flat, and second tier candidates Richardson and Biden ticked down:

Democrats
Obama 32 (+4 vs. last poll Nov 25-28)
Clinton 25 (nc)
Edwards 24 (+1)
Richardson 6 (-3)
Biden 4 (-2)
Undecided 6

Of particular interesting is the break out of the two day rolling averages over the four day sample showing Clinton on a steady decline with Obama and Edwards trending positive:

Overall, Clinton still leads by 1.6% in the RCP Average for Iowa.

On the Republican side, Huckabee maintains his lead over Romney, while McCain looks to be winning the important battle for third place, doubling his support over the last month to 13%. Thompson is in danger of falling into fifth place in this poll, and the bottom appears to have completely fallen out for Rudy in Iowa:

Republicans
Huckabee 32 (+3 vs. last poll Nov 25-28)
Romney 26 (+2)
McCain 13 (+6)
Thompson 9 (nc)
Paul 9 (+2)
Giuliani 5 (-8)
Undecided 4

Again, the break out of the two day rolling averages give an idea of the trend over the four day sample. As you can see, Romney appeared to tick down slightly but overall the trendlines for all the candidates appear surprisingly stable:

Huckabee is now back on top in the RCP Average for Iowa, but by less than a single percentage point.

Also of note: roughly 1/3 of likely Democratic caucusgoers and 1/2 of likely Republican caucusgoers say they "could still be persuaded to support another candidate." Stay tuned.

Killing political reporters' chances at ringing in the New Year, the Des Moines Register will release its all-important Iowa poll tonight.

FOX News' Carl Cameron talks about the "Huckabee Moment" from earlier today:

Now, about that ad, Mark Halperin has a partial transcript here and some bootlegged footage here.

"Make me your second choice..." Barack Obama gives some last-minute advice to Iowa caucus-goers. Needless to say, this wasn't the message Obama's campaign manager David Plouffe was telling reporters on a conference call this morning.

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton took some verbal whacks at surging John Edwards: "Instead of, like, generating a lot of heat and rolling your hands and jumping up and down, lets just sit down and figure out how we are going to beat them."

We're only days away from the Iowa Caucuses and that means the push-pollsters are on the hunt.

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour announced today his choice of Rep. Roger Wicker to replace the outgoing Sen. Trent Lott.

Sara Jane Moore, who took a shot a Gerald Ford back in 1975, was released from prison today, having served about 30 years of a life sentence.

In the first few days of 2008, despite the holiday, the data flow will be pretty heavy, including the employment report on Friday, which we expect to be slightly on the weak side with just 65,000 new jobs. Nonetheless, we expect 2.5% real GDP growth in Q4, and between 3% and 3.5% growth in 2008.

One of the reasons we remain optimistic about the US economy, despite serious problems at large financial institutions and rising delinquencies for sub-prime borrowers, is the underlying health of productivity. Whatever happens in the next year or two, the U.S. will remain a leader in the technological revolution -- a revolution no less significant than the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when mechanization shifted the locus of wealth creation from agriculture to manufacturing.

This time, the shift is taking place between manufacturing and information technologies. But it's important to be careful about what that displacement means. Total industrial output will keep increasing, even excluding high tech. In fact, it hit an all-time high for the US in 2007. But it represents an ever smaller share of total output and an ever smaller share of jobs. The same thing happened during the Industrial Revolution, when farm output soared, prices for food fell and the share of workers in that sector kept falling.

Today, according to the Labor Department, prices for information technology hardware and services are down 90% from 20 years ago. In the past 10 years, the price of personal computing power is down more than 90%.

Meanwhile, Federal Reserve data show the production of computers and peripheral equipment is up 275% and the production of semiconductors and other related equipment production is up almost 1500%. According to the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank, the volume of international telephone calls has increased 20-fold since 1980. In 2006, there were 1.02 billion internet users versus just 2.6 million in 1990.

In a sense, the high-tech revolution and the much earlier Industrial Revolution are two variations of an even longer-term productivity trend that ultimately has its source in the true economic fundamentals of our advanced civilization: property rights, free and enforceable contracts, the rule of law, and a self-restrained population capable of extending these bedrock foundations of capitalism into the future.

When those attributes are in place good things happen despite the ebb and flow of various business cycles. And despite a wave of populism that seems to have its roots in the same transformative upheaval that led to the first wave of populism during the Industrial Revolution, we remain confident that when all is said and done the next generation of Americans, and the ones after that, will live better than their parents.

New Insider Advantage poll of the Dem race in Iowa shows Hillary Clinton and John Edwards closing strong in a tight battle while Obama appears to be slipping:

Clinton 30 (+6 vs. last poll Dec 16-17)
Edwards 29 (+3)
Obama 22 (-5)

Overall, Clinton now leads by 1.8% in the RCP Average for Iowa.

Also good news for Edwards: among those currently planning to support another candidate, 62% identify him as their preferred second choice, only 21% choose Clinton and 17% Obama.

Taking these second choice preferences, Insider Advantage then applied the same reallocation formula they used in '04 which they say correctly a "comfortable win for John Kerry" - Edwards comes away with 41%, Clinton 34%, and Obama 25%.

Should we see a result like that, with Obama finishing in a distant third place 9 points behind Clinton and 16 points behind Edwards, it's hard imagine how Obama's candidacy wouldn't be mortally wounded. But this is simply one poll of many out there right now.

We'll have even more to chew on when the Iowa poll, seen as the Gold Standard in caucus polling, is released later this evening.

As Reid Wilson reports, after telling a roomful of reporters that he was yanking his anti-Romney ad from the airwaves, Mike Huckabee proceeded to show the ad anyway.

The campaign is saying that the ad was shown to prove that it existed -- essentially, to kill questions that this whole thing was set up to make Huckabee look magnanimous. But in addition to showing the ad, Huckabee was also flanked by signs making the same points as the ad. According to Jonathan Martin, the campaign said that Huckabee made the decision too late to remove the signs. Uh-huh.

Why not just cancel the whole thing? It might have come off as a bit unorganized, but at least Huckabee would have been able to play the magnanimous card without the stench of clumsy opportunism, which will certainly be noted in the media reports.

What, no Auld Lang Syne?

Mark Halperin is reporting that Mike Huckabee's planned video/ad response to Mitt Romney's attacks on him has been pulled per the candidate's orders.

But maybe Huck just figured his appearance on CNN's "American Morning" got the point across.

With the Huckabee-Romney feud (with McCain thrown in every now and then) raging, Rudy Giuliani has had a bit of a media blackout, relatively speaking. Indeed, by not competing in Iowa, and having now abandoned New Hampshire, Giuliani will struggle to get good media exposure between now and Florida on Jan. 29. With that in mind, today the campaign released a memo, "Looking Good," arguing that this is still Rudy's race to lose.

Writes strategy director Brent Seaborn:

For the record, only 78 delegates will be picked prior to Florida whereas 1,039 delegates will be picked on January 29 and February 5. Additionally, it is important to note that voting HAS ALREADY STARTED in Florida, Missouri, Georgia, Illinois, New Jersey and New York -- tens of thousands of people will have already cast their ballot by the time you are reading this note. And more February 5th states, including California will begin early and absentee voting soon. All of this points to the folly of over-estimating the impact of the results of Iowa and New Hampshire and the wisdom of our strategy.

The full memo after the jump.

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Should a global-sized blizzard like the one from the movie The Day After Tomorrow, complete with the instant-death freeze cyclone, hit Iowa on Caucus Day, I think we can all thank Reid Wilson for the jinx.

After last week's run of negative ads (see here and here), Mitt Romney kicks off the week on a more positive note:

More videos, including all the Sunday shows, in the Vlog.