Obama, Clinton and Edwards played nice. Huckabee made good on a promise to clean up his act, the day after he held a news conference to say he wouldn't run a critical ad against Romney — but then showed it to a room full of reporters and cameramen.

"It does remind you a bit of a person who stands up and says 'I'm not going to call my opponent any names, but here are the names I'd call him if I were going to call him names,"' Romney told reporters in Johnston.

With two days left in the campaign, Romney continued his ads against Huckabee. He also assailed Huckabee's defense of his own failure to read the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran last month.

"President Bush didn't read it for four years; I don't know why I should read it in four hours," Huckabee said in an interview published Monday in the Mason City Globe Gazette.

Romney seized on the comment: "I'm not sure whether Governor Huckabee meant the attack as a joke, but this is not a time to be mocking our president, and it was I think in bad taste."

A multimillionaire, Romney also indicated that he had funneled more of his personal fortune into his campaign, but wouldn't say how much. He had contributed $17 million through September.

For the most part, candidates spent New Year's Day trying to energize supporters.

In the Des Moines area, Romney combined football and politics at a series of "House Party Huddles." At one, children ran around bashing one another with large, red foam mitts that read "Mitt '08."

At an Elks Lodge in Cedar Rapids, Huckabee pulled out a bass guitar and played "Blue Suede Shoes" and "Mustang Sally" with a singer and drummer, a warm-up perhaps for his appearance Wednesday with Jay Leno on NBC's "Tonight Show."

Obama's family was enthusiastic, buoyed by a Des Moines Register poll that showed him in the lead. His wife, Michelle, talked about "when Barack is the next president of the United States" and he referred to her "the next first lady of the United States."

"We stand on the brink of doing something very, very special here in Iowa," Obama said.

His chief rival, Clinton, campaigned with her 88-year old mother, Dorothy Rodham, and daughter, Chelsea, in tow as she worked to solidify her already strong support among female voters. Her husband, former President Clinton, campaigned separately, joking at one event that he was missing out on a day of football games and was being "the quintessential indolent American male on New Year's Day."

His faux grumbling aside, Clinton's campaign seized on a CNN poll that had her in the lead as aides picked apart the methodology of the Register survey.