The USA TODAY/Gallup poll, taken Friday through Sunday, found that Clinton has widened her lead over Obama. Her support was at 48 percent, up 8 percentage points from three weeks ago, while Obama's support was down two percentage points at 26 percent.

The 22-point gap between the two is nearly double the margin found in the July 12-15 poll.

Among Democrats and independents who "lean" Democratic, former North Carolina senator John Edwards is at 12 percent.

Among Republicans, the race is stable: former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani at 33 percent, former Tennessee senator Fred Thompson at 21 percent, Arizona Sen. John McCain at 16 percent and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney at 8 percent.

The Democratic race is much closer in the states where opening contests will be held and campaigning is already fierce, the USA Today newspaper reported.

In the survey, Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents by overwhelming margins say Clinton would do a better job as president than Obama in handling terrorism, the Iraq war and relations with unfriendly nations.

If the nomination narrows down to two, Clinton was preferred over Obama by 59 percent to 36 percent.

Also in the poll, President George W. Bush's approval rating ticked up to 34 percent, better than his low of 29 percent in July. The approval rating for congressional Republicans was 29 percent and 37 percent for congressional Democrats -- both new lows in the eight years since the question was first asked.

The survey of 1,012 adults has an error margin of +/- 3 points for the full sample, and 5 points for the Republican and Democratic subsamples.

Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., said Bush was trying to exploit the threat from al-Qaida to push the bill. Feingold said the measure was an "egregious power grab that includes broad new powers that have nothing to do with bringing FISA up to date."

Shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush authorized the NSA to spy on calls between people in the U.S. and suspected terrorists abroad without FISA court warrants. The administration said it needed to act more quickly than the court could. It also said the president had inherent authority under the Constitution to order warrantless domestic spying.

The national intelligence director, in a letter Wednesday to the House intelligence committee, stressed the need to be able to collect intelligence about foreign terrorists overseas. Mike McConnell said intelligence agencies should be able to do that without requirements imposed by an "out of date" law.

Reyes said Saturday that the committee is intently focused on the issue.

Caroline Fredrickson, director of the Washington legislative office of the American Civil Liberties Union, contends the White House is asking for more power to conduct warrantless domestic and international surveillance.

The ACLU said the legislation backed by the administration would give immunity from criminal prosecution and civil liability for the telecommunication companies that participate in the NSA program. The ACLU urged lawmakers to find out the full extent of current intelligence gathering under FISA before making changes.

The House Republican leader, Rep. John Boehner of Ohio, said Democrats are delaying necessary changes.

"Rather than learning the lessons of September 11 — that we need to break down the bureaucratic impediments to intelligence collection and analysis — Democrats have stonewalled Republican attempts to modernize FISA and close the terrorist loophole," he said Saturday.

"While the vendor has fixed many of these flaws, many important vulnerabilities remain unaddressed," the report said.

The lab found, for example, that someone with only brief access to a machine could replace a memory card with one preprogramed to read one candidate's votes as counting for another, essentially switching the candidates and showing the loser winning in that precinct.

"The attack can be carried out with a reasonably low probability of detection assuming that audits with paper ballots are infrequent," the report said.

Browning asked Diebold Elections Systems to address the problems by Aug. 17, and expressed confidence that the company will do so before next year's primary election.

"To Diebold's credit, they have come to the table and been willing to get these changes made and get them made timely," Browning said.

A company spokesman said the deadline would be met.

"These are not major changes, and we are confident we can meet the deadline," said Mark Radke, who also said the company has worked well with the state. "We look forward to continuing this relationship and to continuing to improve the security of our elections systems."

Browning said that the memory cards are locked in machines and that only a few people have access to them in a setting where others wouldn't see them unscrewing machines, breaking seals and switching cards.

"It is not where you just walk up to a machine and pop out a card," he said.

Tampering with the software is much easier in a laboratory than trying to carry out the same actions during an election, Browning said. Still, he said, his office will advise county elections supervisors on steps that should be taken to ensure machines won't be tampered with.

Florida's voting system drew national attention in 2000, when dimpled, pregnant and hanging chads on punch card ballots held up a final count in the presidential election. Florida was eventually decided by 537 votes after the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in, handing the election to George W. Bush. The state has since banned the punch cards.

Currently, 15 of Florida's 67 counties use paperless touch-screen voting machines, while the rest use optical scan machines where a voter marks a paper ballot with a pencil and it is electronically scanned. Touch-screen machines are being scrapped because of a newly signed state law that requires a verifiable paper trail for all voting machines.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) organized the rare all-night session in an attempt to dramatize the fight between Republicans and Democrats over the amendment.

The amendment, which was attached to the Department of Defense authorization bill, had majority support thanks to several Republicans who backed it. But Republicans used a procedural maneuver available to the minority party to require a 60-vote majority to move the bill forward.

Democrats only mustered 52 votes in favor of invoking cloture, falling short of the 60 required. Forty-seven senators voted against cloture. Reid at first voted in favor of cloture, but changed his vote at the last minute to join Republicans opposing it.

Reid’s vote against cloture allows him to call for another vote on the measure at a time of his choosing, according to spokesman Jim Manley, who said the switch was “only for procedure.”

Reid expressed his disappointment at the outcome shortly after the vote but pledged to keep trying to pass legislation aimed at changing course in Iraq.

"We spent two days showing America that we're not going to back down, that we're going to continue to fight," he said. "How could we possibly shrink from this fight? How could we possibly try to avoid this fight?"

Reid had accused Republicans of obstructionism for blocking a simple-majority up-or-down vote on the amendment. But Republicans defended their maneuver as a standard tool of the minority party.

In a news conference before the all night session began Tuesday, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said that "time after time when the other side was in the minority they also invoked the 60-vote requirement."

"I don't think Congress ought to be running the war," Bush said. "They ought to be funding the troops."

He asked lawmakers to wait until September for a more telling analysis of progress.

The president said that he understood that "there's war fatigue in America" - even among some Republican lawmakers - but added that bringing troops home before they had achieved success would mean disaster. In what seemed to be another signal that he plans no sudden change on Iraq, Bush announced that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates would travel to the Middle East next month to reassure U.S. allies of American support.

The progress report arrived on Capitol Hill as the Senate and House were conducting separate debates on the war. While the president renewed his threat to veto any legislation calling for a timetable for troop withdrawal, the Democratic majority worked to build support for such proposals.

"Today's report from the president confirms what many had suspected - the war in Iraq is headed in a dangerous direction," said Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader. "The Iraqi government has not met the key political benchmarks it has set for itself and Iraqi security forces continue to lag well behind expectations."

He added: "We must change course now, not in September."

And Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, a Democratic presidential hopeful, said, "Don't tell us we're making progress in Iraq when the last three months have been some of the deadliest since this war began."

The document, reflecting input from top U.S. military, diplomatic and intelligence officials, described a "complex and extremely challenging" security situation. It predicted "tough fighting" through the summer and accelerated attacks by anti-coalition fighters with the approach of September.

But the document also pointed toward "encouraging signs that should, over time, point the way to a more normalized and sustainable level of U.S. engagement in Iraq, with a decreasing number of U.S. combat forces increasingly focused on a core set of missions, such as those set out by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group."

In December, the Iraq Study Group called for a phased withdrawal of combat troops, a formulation supported by some Democrats in Congress. Bush said Thursday that he shared the study group's goal of moving toward "a more limited role in Iraq for the United States."

But he said it was wrong to suggest that his administration did not want to bring the troops home as soon as possible.

"If we increase our support at this crucial moment, we can hasten the day our troops begin coming home," he said.

The legislation that required the two reports said that if the president could not certify progress on the benchmarks, he would have to propose changes in strategy or see war funding reduced.

The document asserts that satisfactory progress has been achieved on eight of the 18 benchmarks, predominantly in military areas. Movement on eight others was unsatisfactory, with political reconciliation lagging. Two other areas got mixed assessments.

But the report said that even when the political performance of the Iraqi government had been unsatisfactory, it was too early to make final judgments.

That approach allowed the administration to rebut recent claims by some in Congress that almost no progress had been made in Iraq since Bush changed course in January and sent 30,000 additional troops to Iraq.

The report insisted on the need for more time to see the results of the just-completed troop increase; progress on national reconciliation may require "a sustained period of reduced violence in order to build trust." Only half the 300 extra civilian teams dedicated to provincial reconstruction are in place, and the full complement will not be reached until December, the report says.

The administration report certified satisfactory progress on providing trained Iraqi brigades to support Baghdad operations; preventing Baghdad from becoming "a safe haven for any outlaws"; and protecting minority-part rights in the Iraqi legislature.

Progress was inadequate on making it easier for former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party to obtain government jobs as a step toward reconciliation with Sunnis; disarming militia groups; buffering Iraqi commanders from "political intervention"; and passing oil and revenue-sharing legislation.

Another shortfall was in "increasing the number of Iraqi Security Forces units capable of operating independently." Progress had been "slow," and operations by those forces still required "the presence of coalition partners and support." Political reconciliation remained elusive, the document said.

Throughout Iraq, ethnic and sectarian division, violence, corruption and lack of basic services remained problematic. There were some signs of economic progress, however, including slightly lower unemployment and inflation rates.

A military bright spot, often cited by the administration, was the somewhat improved situation in Anbar Province.

The administration has worried that benchmarks could effectively provide the coalition's enemies with a recipe for frustrating its goals. Indeed, the report predicts that a resilient Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, or AQI for its other name, Al Qaeda in Iraq, will "attempt to increase its tempo of attacks as September approaches - in an effort to influence U.S. domestic opinion about sustained U.S. engagement in Iraq."

The report reasserts an Iranian link to the violence, saying, "Iran continues to train, fund and equip extremist groups, both Shi'a and Sunni, that attack Iraqi and coalition forces."

The Syrian role is assessed harshly as well. The report says that an estimated 80 percent of suicide bombers in Iraq are foreigners, most of whom have passed through Syria after flying from their home countries to Damascus. "This Syria-based network is able to supply some 50 to 80 suicide bombers to AQI per month," the analysis states.

But in one sign of progress, it says that suicide attacks involving vehicle-born explosives have declined in recent months from the all-time highs they hit in March and April, following "aggressive coalition and Iraqi operations into former AQI havens."

A central coalition goal has been to create conditions for the Iraqi government and officials to be able to work in relative peace to establish political normality. In Anbar, the report says, that is beginning to happen. "The provincial government - for the first time in a year - is now able to meet in the province," it says.

And fundamentally, the report finds that the Iraqi political establishment lacks both the culture and the will for rapid progress, partly because it depends on consensus building between competing groups. National reconciliation requires both leadership and, the report says, "expression of a common national political will, or 'vision,' that has so far been lacking."

Still, the report again found reason for hope. The national response to the June 13 bombing of a mosque in Samarra - which provoked fears of a cycle of reprisal violence - was relatively effective in muting such a reaction, the report states. "When necessary, the government of Iraq and major political figures can overcome the dynamics that otherwise inhibit effectiveness," it says.