WASHINGTON (AP) - Barack Obama's support from backers of Hillary Rodham Clinton is stuck smack where it was in June, a poll showed Tuesday, a stunning lack of progress that is weakening him with members of the Democratic Party in the close presidential race.

An Associated Press-Yahoo News poll shows that among adults who backed his rival during their bitter primary campaign, 58 percent now support Obama. That is the same percentage who said so in June, when Clinton ended her bid and urged her backers to line up behind the Democratic senator from Illinois.

The poll shows that while Obama has gained ground among Clinton's supporters - 69 percent view him favorably now, up 9 percentage points from June - this has yet to translate into more of their support.

In part, this is because their positive views of Republican presidential nominee John McCain have also improved during this period.

Those supporting McCain have also edged up from 21 percent to 28 percent, with the number of undecided staying constant, the survey showed.

Clinton backers' reluctance to support Obama helps explain why he is having a tougher time solidifying partisan supporters than McCain. Overall, 74 percent of Democrats say they will vote for Obama, compared with 87 percent of Republicans behind the Arizona senator. About nine in 10 Clinton supporters are Democrats.

The problem that supporters of Clinton, the New York senator, have with Obama seems to flow from their measure of him as a candidate, not from issues. From establishing a timeline for a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq to abortion to canceling tax cuts on the rich, their views of the importance of issues are virtually identical to Democrats in general.

Yet they find Obama less likable, honest, experienced and inspiring than Democrats overall do, and have a better view of McCain. And while majorities of Clinton supporters say Obama shares their values and understands ordinary Americans, they're less likely to say so than Democrats overall.

"It's just a gut feeling, my gut tells me he's not it," Leslye Burgess, 53, a federal Treasury Department manager and Democrat from Fairfax, Va., said of Obama. The Clinton supporter added, "I'll have to fight with myself between now and November" about how she'll vote.

The GOP's selection of Sarah Palin as McCain's running mate has had no net impact on Clinton loyalists - a group Republicans were hoping to lure by picking the Alaska governor. Twenty-one percent in the poll said Palin on the ticket makes them likelier to back McCain, 21 percent said it makes them less likely, and 58 percent said it had no impact.

The choice of Joe Biden as Democratic vice presidential candidate makes them a bit likelier to vote for Obama, but seven in 10 said it won't be a factor.

Other September polls have shown Obama making progress in recent weeks with one-time Clinton backers and doing better with them than in the AP-Yahoo News survey. One by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center had Obama with 78 percent of their support and McCain with 18 percent; another by ABC News and The Washington Post showed Obama ahead 72 percent to 23 percent.

Those figures measured Clinton supporters who are registered voters - who in the AP-Yahoo News poll leaned toward Obama over McCain 61 percent to 26 percent. The discrepancies in the polls might come from how they were conducted.

Obama spokesman Bill Burton said Clinton supporters are turning to Obama "in huge numbers" and noted that the AP-Yahoo News data differed from other polls. He said strong feelings by Clinton supporters were understandable considering the length and intensity of the Democratic primaries and said of Clinton, "She's done everything we've asked her to do."

Clinton spokeswoman Kathleen Strand said the New York senator has campaigned in or planned to visit seven tightly contested states. Asked to explain why some of her supporters still oppose Obama, Strand said, "She's going to continue to do whatever she can to convince everyone, no matter who they supported, that Barack Obama must be our president."

The AP-Yahoo News poll has surveyed the same nationally representative group of about 2,000 adults seven times since November, in an effort to understand how individuals are reacting to the presidential race. Nine in 10 Clinton supporters who said in June they were backing Obama were still with him in September, while three-quarters of those with McCain stayed with him.

As during her primary battle against Obama, Clinton supporters are likelier to be female, white and less educated than those who did not back her.

They trust Obama more than McCain on important issues, though not by as much as Democrats overall do. They prefer Obama over McCain on the economy by 30 percentage points, compared with Obama's 50-point edge among all Democrats. They like Obama on Iraq by 17 points, while all Democrats give Obama a 40-point margin.

The starkest contrast comes from comparing Clinton backers still refusing to support Obama with other Democrats.

Just three in 10 Clinton supporters still not backing Obama view him favorably, compared with eight in 10 of all Democrats. While most Democrats and former Clinton supporters strongly prefer Obama over McCain to handle key issues, those Clinton voters still opposing Obama opt for McCain: On the economy by 32 points, and on Iraq by 47 points.

One in four Clinton backers say they've not yet locked into a candidate - and far more of those supporting Obama than McCain say they support their candidate strongly. Many who have already decided to back Obama say the transition wasn't difficult.

Kathy McVeigh, 60, a nurse from Norwalk, Ohio, has moved from Clinton to Obama and said she would tell wavering Clinton voters "to get on the bandwagon because we need change, we better do something in a hurry because we're going down the tubes."

The AP-Yahoo News poll of 1,740 adults was conducted Sept. 5-15 and has an overall margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2.3 percentage points. It included interviews with 502 people who in AP-Yahoo News polls in January and April identified themselves as supporting Clinton in one or both of those months, for whom the margin of sampling error was plus or minus 4.4 points.

The survey was conducted over the Internet by Knowledge Networks, which initially contacted people using traditional telephone polling methods and followed with online interviews. People chosen for the study who had no Internet access were given it for free.

In contrast, the Pew and ABC-Post polls relied on people saying in September whether they supported Clinton earlier this year. Those polls were conducted by telephone; some studies have shown people can be less reluctant to disclose embarrassing behavior - like not supporting their party's presidential nominee - in an online survey than to a live telephone interviewer.

On the other hand, people in the AP-Yahoo News poll who backed Clinton in earlier waves of the survey might not want to appear inconsistent by suddenly backing a candidate - Obama - they opposed earlier.

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WASHINGTON (AP) - The FBI is investigating four major U.S. financial institutions whose collapse helped trigger a $700 billion bailout plan by the Bush administration, The Associated Press has learned.

Two law enforcement officials said Tuesday the FBI is looking at potential fraud by mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae (FNM) and Freddie Mac (FRE), and insurer American International Group Inc. (AIG) Additionally, a senior law enforcement official said Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. (LEH) also is under investigation.

The inquiries will focus on the financial institutions and the individuals that ran them, the senior law enforcement official said.

The law enforcement officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigations are ongoing and are in the very early stages.

Officials said the new inquiries bring to 26 the number of corporate lenders under investigation over the past year.

Spokesmen for AIG, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac did not immediately return calls for comment Tuesday evening. A Lehman spokesman did not have an immediate comment.

Just last week, FBI Director Robert Mueller put the number of large financial firms under investigation at 24. He did not name any of the companies under investigation but said the FBI also was looking at whether any of them have misrepresented their assets.

Over the past year as the housing market cratered, the FBI has opened a wide-ranging probe of companies across the financial services industry, from mortgage lenders to investment banks that bundle home loans into securities sold to investors. Mueller has previously said the FBI's hunt for culprits in the nation's subprime mortgage crisis focused on accounting fraud, insider trading, and failure to disclose the value of mortgage-related securities and other investments.

The investigations revealed Tuesday come as lawmakers began considering whether to approve emergency legislation that would give the government broad power to buy up devalued assets from troubled financial firms.

The bailout proposed by the Bush administration is aimed at helping unlock credit and stabilize badly shaken markets in the United States and around the globe.

In the past two weeks, the government has taken over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the country's two biggest mortgage companies, with a bailout plan that could require the Treasury Department to put up as much as $100 billion for each of them over time if needed to keep them afloat as mortgage losses mount.

Last week, the Federal Reserve provided an emergency $85 billion loan to AIG, which teetered on the brink of bankruptcy. Lehman Brothers was forced to file for bankruptcy after attempts to engineer a private rescue fell apart. All the companies were laid low from bad bets on complex mortgage-related securities.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke made the joint decision last week that the only way to stop the carnage was to deal with the root cause of all the troubles, billions of dollars of bad mortgage debt sitting on the books of major financial companies. This debt has triggered the worst credit crisis in decades, causing credit markets to essentially freeze up despite the fact that the Fed joined with major central banks around the world to pump billions of dollars of reserves into the financial system.

Additionally, the FBI is investigating failed bank IndyMac Bancorp Inc. for possible fraud. Countrywide Financial Corp., formerly the nation's largest mortgage lender and now owned by Bank of America Corp. (BAC), is also under scrutiny.

WASHINGTON (AP) - Democrats have decided to allow a quarter-century ban on drilling for oil off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts to expire next week, conceding defeat in a months-long battle with the White House and Republicans set off by $4 a gallon gasoline prices this summer.

House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey, D-Wis., told reporters Tuesday that a provision continuing the moratorium will be dropped this year from a stopgap spending bill to keep the government running after Congress recesses for the election.

Republicans have made lifting the ban a key campaign issue after gasoline prices spiked this summer and public opinion turned in favor of more drilling. President Bush lifted an executive ban on offshore drilling in July.

"If true, this capitulation by Democrats following months of Republican pressure is a big victory for Americans struggling with record gasoline prices," said House GOP leader John Boehner of Ohio.

Democrats had clung to the hope of only a partial repeal of the drilling moratorium, but the White House had promised a veto, Obey said.

The House is expected to act on the spending bill Wednesday. The Senate is likely to go along with the House.

"The White House has made it clear they will not accept anything with a drilling moratorium, and Democrats know we cannot afford to shut down the government over this," said Jim Manley, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. "We look forward to working with the next president to hammer out a final resolution of this issue."

While the House would lift the long-standing drilling moratoriums for both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, a drilling ban in waters within 125 miles of Florida's western coast would remain in force under a law passed by Congress in 2006 that opened some new areas of the east-central Gulf to drilling.

Just last week, the House passed legislation to open waters off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts to oil and gas drilling but only 50 or more miles out to sea and only if a state agrees to energy development off its shore. It quickly became clear that measure would not get the 60 votes needed in the Senate.

Republicans called that effort a sham that would have left almost 90 percent of offshore reserves effectively off-limits.

The Interior Department estimates there are 18 billion barrels of recoverable oil beneath the Outer Continental Shelf, about half of it off California.

While the ban on energy development will be lifted if the Senate goes along with the House action, it doesn't mean any federal sale of oil and gas leases in the offshore waters - much less actual drilling - would be imminent.

The Interior Department's current five-year leasing plan includes potential leases off the Virginia coast but probably would not be pursued unless the state agrees to energy development. And the state is unlikely to do so without Congress agreeing to share federal royalties with the state.

The congressional battle over offshore drilling is far from over. Democrats are expected to press for broader energy legislation, probably next year, that would put limits on any drilling off most of the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Republicans, meanwhile, are likely to fight any resumption of the drilling bans that have been in place since 1981.

John McCain, the Republican presidential nominee, has promised to make offshore oil drilling a priority if elected president. He has called for developing the oil and gas resources along all of Outer Continental Shelf and for the federal government to share royalties with states who go along with drilling.

Democratic presidential rival Barack Obama has said he would support limited drilling in certain areas - possibly the South Atlantic region - if it is part of a broader energy plan to shift the U.S. away from oil to alternative fuels and more energy efficiency.

The debate over offshore drilling is not expected to subside in the first months of the next presidency - no matter who sits in the White House.

Lifting the drilling ban gives considerable momentum to the underlying bill, which includes the Pentagon budget, $24 billion in aid for flood and hurricane victims and $25 billion in loans for Detroit automakers in addition to keeping the government open past the Oct. 1 start of the 2009 budget year.

But Democrats decided not to use the must-pass measure as a battering ram to carry an extension of unemployment benefits for the long-term jobless past White House veto promises, prompting grumbling among some lawmakers. Efforts to boost food stamps and give states billions of dollars to help with Medicaid bills also fell through.

But the measure would double, to $5.2 billion, funding for heating subsidies for the poor, Obey said.

The measure also would provide more than $600 billion to fund the 2009 budgets for the Pentagon, Homeland Security Department and the Veterans Affairs Department. Nine other spending bills for the 2009 budget year starting Oct. 1 remain unfinished.

Bush had threatened to veto bills that don't cut the number and cost of pet projects known as "earmarks" sought by lawmakers in half from current levels or cause agency operating budgets, taken together, to exceed his request. Obey said, however, the White House would reluctantly sign the measure.

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