If the three main candidates in the race for the 1st Congressional District can't put any distance between each other, there appears to be a host of outside forces willing to jump in to try and do it for them.

The past week in the campaign highlighted how closely this race is being watched from 4,833 miles away in Washington, D.C.

“;Certainly none of the candidates have said anything dramatically different this week,”; said local political expert Neal Milner, a University of Hawaii professor of political science. “;Mainly what's changed is what seems to be going on beneath the surface and even that hasn't been very definitive yet.”;

And ballots for the special election don't go out for another three weeks.

The week began with Democrat Colleen Hanabusa sign-waving with her most ardent backer, U.S. Sen. Dan Inouye, after an embarrassing weekend in which she yanked a campaign ad over misleading claims of cutting legislative salaries.

Fellow Democrat Ed Case launched a new ad in which he declared that he is, in fact, a “;strong Democrat”; ... and a fiscal conservative ... and an independent.

Meanwhile, Republican Charles Djou faced a television attack ad from a Washington, D.C.-based Democratic group that later was declared false by research site Factcheck.-org.

As the campaign wears on, there appears a growing fear among Democrats that Obama's home district — where he won with 70 percent of the vote in 2008 — could flip to the GOP, Milner said.

Much of the news in the past week focused on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the arm of the party that works to get Democrats elected to Congress.

Word out of Washington, fueled by reports on Web sites and blogs, was that the DCCC was sending operatives to Hawaii to help prevent a repeat of the Massachusetts Senate race for Ted Kennedy's former seat that went to the GOP's Scott Brown.

Then came reports that the DCCC was ready to make an endorsement of Case as the more electable candidate, only to be held off by Inouye. DCCC Chairman Chris Van Hollen said only that the committee would not rule out making an endorsement.

By week's end, an Asian-American political action committee that had contributed to Inouye was warning the DCCC to stay out of the race. The group said it would be unseemly to endorse Case, who is Caucasian, in a state that is “;58 percent Asian- American.”;

“;That's a real kind of mainland thing,”; Milner said. “;No one would play the ethnicity and race card in quite the same way if it were coming out of here.”;

It still did not bode well for Hanabusa, he added.

“;I think that if they are backing Case, it's probably because they're sufficiently concerned about Djou's chances,”; he said. “;They are just picking the candidate that they think has the best chance to win in a situation that is more vulnerable and more symbolically threatening to the Democrats than people originally thought it would be.”;

Meanwhile, a DCCC television ad attacked Djou for signing a pledge that the Democratic group said supported tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas. The reputable research site Factcheck.-org debunked the claim as false, although the DCCC stood by the ad.

On Thursday, during a forum on PBS Hawaii, the two Democrats said all the action was simply a sign of national groups getting more involved in the race, noting that national Republican groups are likely doing the same thing.

Djou called it an intra-party civil war between national Democrats in Washington and the “;Democratic machine”; in Hawaii.

“;For Djou it's all about arithmetic, basically,”; and getting Democrats to split the vote and give him a plurality, Milner said.

Although national GOP groups were relatively quiet, the state party organization was criticizing Hanabusa for her legislative salaries ad and sending out news releases hitting Case for what it called his record of voting to raise taxes on middle-class families during his first stint in Congress.

Milner said it remains to be seen whether the GOP can score any points against Case.

“;He's always presented himself as a kind of centrist,”; he said. “;But they don't have the anger — he's not there right now. He didn't vote on the health care bill.

“;It's hard to ratchet up people when they're dealing with Case.”;