WASHINGTON (AFP) - Hillary Clinton would be the Democrats' White House nominee today if former presidential hopeful John Edwards had come clean earlier about an extra-marital affair, a top aide to Clinton believes.

"I believe we would have won Iowa, and Clinton today would therefore have been the nominee," Howard Wolfson, who was the combative communications director for Clinton's doomed campaign, told ABCNews.com.

In an interview released Monday, Wolfson also said that Clinton's campaign knew about the affair but kept quiet.

"Any of the campaigns that would have tried to push that would have been burned by it," he said.

Former senator Edwards, whose wife Elizabeth is stricken with terminal breast cancer, confessed Friday to having had an affair in 2006 with filmmaker Rielle Hunter.

But Edwards, who was the Democrats' vice presidential nominee in 2004 and bowed out of this year's White House race in late January, denied fathering the six-month-old baby of Hunter.

Wolfson insisted that Edwards voters in Iowa, whose presidential caucuses kicked off the 2008 race in early January, would have been behind Clinton rather than Barack Obama.

"Our voters and Edwards' voters were the same people," he said, citing internal polling by the Clinton campaign.

"They were older, pro-union. Not all, but maybe two-thirds of them would have been for us and we would have barely beaten Obama."

Obama, who is set to be crowned the Democratic nominee in just over a fortnight, won the Iowa caucuses with 37.58 percent of the vote. Edwards came second on 29.75 percent, a hair's breadth ahead of Clinton with 29.47 percent.

It was a shock result that derailed what was once seen as an "inevitable" march to the nomination by the former first lady, and put Obama firmly in the driving seat over the marathon primary process that followed.

Just two months before the caucuses, Edwards had angrily denied a National Enquirer report about an affair with Hunter, and the issue was ignored by the mainstream press until he belatedly came clean on Friday.

While the Obama campaign did not comment on Wolfson's claim, it can point to subsequent primary results to undermine the assertion that supporters of Edwards were a natural fit with Clinton's.

Both Edwards and Obama ran outsiders' campaigns that vowed to take on Washington politics, and after Edwards bowed out, the Illinois senator swept 11 nominating contests in a row in February.

But Wolfson's intervention does come at a sensitive time just ahead of the Democratic convention, with Clinton supporters demanding a potentially divisive roll-call vote to formally acclaim her battle for the nomination.

Meanwhile as Democrats denied that the revelations about Edwards would hurt their electoral chances in November, Hunter was reported to have ruled out a DNA test to establish the paternity of her baby.

Edwards offered to take the test in an emotional ABC television interview on Friday, when he also denied extending financial payments to Hunter to buy her silence.

AFP, August 11, 2008