November 19, 2007

11/19: Here Comes The Mud

With 45 days to go before the Iowa caucuses, the mud is starting to fly. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama spent the weekend exchanging barbs over rumors that the Clinton campaign is sitting on "scandalous information" about Obama. On the GOP side, the leading candidates denied being behind recent IA and NH phone calls attacking Mitt Romney and invoking his Mormon faith. Naturally, the blogosphere has been buzzing with speculation about these two latest scandals.

DEM FIELD: It's All About Iowa

IA Independent's Chase Martyn carried out an un-scientific evaluation of the Dems' IA campaigns "based on impressions we received from activists, everyday caucus-goers, event attendees, and pundits about the quality of each campaign's on-the-ground organization, the likelihood of each candidate's supporters actually attending a caucus, second choice support, and -- at the most basic level -- gut feelings and guesses." He concludes that "If the Democratic caucuses were held tonight," the results would be:

1.) John Edwards 2.) Barack Obama 3.) Hillary Clinton 4.) Joe Biden 5.) Bill Richardson 6.) Chris Dodd 7.) Dennis Kucinich 8.) Mike Gravel

MyDD's Todd Beeton thinks Martyn is underestimating HRC's support: "The implication here is that Clinton's lead in the polls out of Iowa is hollow, which I find to be an intriguing conclusion for a couple of reasons. First, while Clinton's lead has been narrow (and shrinking of late), it has been consistent. The other thing about her polling strength is that it was completely earned. Throughout the spring and summer, Clinton polled regularly in second or third place; for the past month, while second third have been fluid, her lead has been remarkably stable. So, while I'm not in Iowa, nor do I claim to be an expert on the complexities of the Iowa caucus, my gut tells me that, were the caucus to be held today, Clinton would probably end up in second and Obama in third."

MyDD's Jerome Armstrong observes: "On the Democratic side, for every 1 ad that Edwards has run, Obama has ran 9, and Clinton has ran 5, and yet, when you look at who regularly attends the caucuses, John Edwards has the lead; and even among those polled is right there in the mix. I think given Obama's huge spend at this date, he's probably reached his ceiling of support in the state...If Obama comes in 3rd in Iowa, he's not recovering. The media will totally write him off, and Edwards will face the task of following up. If Edwards finishes 3rd, he's done, and Obama will have a one-on-one against Clinton in NH. If Clinton finishes 3rd, it's probably better for her than if she finishes 2nd, as then the story will still be a 3-way race (and that probably favors a comeback for her in NH)."

On a related note, The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder asks, "Will Obama turn out young voters in Iowa?" and breaks down the various arguments. He observes (among other things):

"Pro: College kids will be back home and will be distributed throughout the state, thereby magnifying their effect on other precincts. (The scenario: four IA State Univ. students don't caucus in Ames; they caucus in Adair County, where they live, and have a disproportionate effect on their particular caucus meeting). (The political director of the IA Dem party agrees with this argument).

Con: It's much harder to track these kids and to make sure that, when they're back home, they do caucus.

Pro: Obama has more money than any other credible challenger in history; his campaign is not making the same mistakes that Howard Dean's made; Obama is a much better presence on the campaign trail than Bill Bradley and Gary Hart ever were;

Con: There is no historical precedent for changing the demographic composition of the turnout universe that radically."

OBAMA: Meet My Rapid-Response Team

The Chicago Sun-Times' Robert Novak set off fireworks in the Dem race when he wrote in his Sunday column: "Agents of Sen. Hillary Clinton are spreading the word in Democratic circles that she has scandalous information about her principal opponent for the party's presidential nomination, Sen. Barack Obama, but has decided not to use it. The nature of the alleged scandal was not disclosed." Obama immediately issued a strong rebuttal in which he denounced "the old 'Swift boat' politics," while Clinton's campaign denied being involved and chastised Obama for "echoing Republican talking points." Editor & Publisher breaks down the story here.

Time's Mark Halperin offers his take: "Obama's fast and aggressive response statement is a truly striking move. Instead of ignoring a weekend item by a conservative columnist, the campaign decided to create another moment in which it forcefully challenges Clinton and her association with the 'old' politics of Washington. It is a tough call-to-arms for his supporters. The campaign's response also -- whether intended or not -- just might insulate Obama from any actual revelations, allowing his campaign to claim that anything that comes out is the product of the 'politics of personal destruction' engineered by the Clinton political machine."

Time's Joe Klein is disgusted by Novak's role in the scandal: "Journalists are continually bombarded with rumors, often scurrilous. They are not news. Rumors only become news when they are confirmed, cross-checked and responded to by the target of the attack. There are two possible reasons why Novak is peddling unconfirmed crap: (a) he is getting too old to do the actual legwork long-associated with his column (and respected even by those of us who find his views reprehensible) or (b) he has simply abandoned all pretense of being a journalist."

Talking Points Memo's Steve Benen agrees with Klein that Novak's column is "a textbook case of media irresponsibility" and writes: "A few observations. First, Novak's column smeared both Clinton and Obama, and the two campaigns proceeded to make it worse by spending the entire day bickering over what was, as a practical matter, a dumb column devoid of any substance. Second, I guess Obama's rapid-response operation is finally up and running -- and Clinton's rapid-response operation is on hair-trigger alert. Third, any talk about a Clinton-Obama ticket seems quite silly in light of recent events. One gets the sense that the two campaigns genuinely dislike one another."

Digby thinks Obama and Clinton played into Novak's hands: "We don't know exactly what happened here, of course, but Democratic campaigns should know better that to ever use Robert Novak to try to score points either way. His item, (just like Rove's from earlier in the week) was a twofer, virtually designed to make both candidates look bad -- and, frankly, both of their responses only reaffirmed that impression."

AMERICAblog's John Aravosis smells hypocrisy in Obama's indignant response: "Now, I'm sure the Clinton campaign is quite adept at pulling many a trick, but for Obama to pull the 'I never!' card -- well, let's just say, yeah he has."

OBAMA II: Fewer Slogans, More Specifics

Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall, responding to an interesting Reed Hundt post , offers what has become a familiar netroots critique of Obama's campaign: "What's the premise of Obama's campaign? I hear less triangulating, more principle (which basically means the same thing), change, etc. But those are slogans. To make these work politically I think Obama would have to say, Clinton is the cautious Democratic politics of the past. It was good in its day. And I respect all that Sen. Clinton has accomplished for our party. But I'm about something different and that's why X, Y and Z. Perhaps it's something dramatic on climate change. But that's not the point. I'm not running his campaign. But I think you need policy specifics that demonstrate the point."

Later, Marshall adds: "My disappointment with Obama's campaign to date is that it's really, ironically, been pretty old politics to me. And I mean that in this sense. Going back several cycles, you've often had some version of the Gore v. Bradley campaign in 2000. One candidate who's the establishment party figure and another who talks about new stuff and change and principle and generally whets the appetites of the party's cerebral types but then never quite delivers with anything specific and gets crushed by the well-oiled campaign of the establishment candidate. I've seen different versions of this in Mondale/Hart, Clinton/Tsongas, Gore/Bradley. And the same result every time."

DODD: You Can't Please Everybody

MyDD's Melissa Ryan offers a passionate endorsement of Chris Dodd: "He's a fighter, a man who realizes it isn't enough to be right on the issues you have to fight the good fight. Chris Dodd isn't paying lip service to fighting telecom immunity, restoring Habeas Corpus, and ending the war in Iraq. Chris Dodd isn't paying lip service to domestic issues like the mortgage crisis. Chris Dodd is fighting the good fight and engaging citizens in the process every step of the way."

Daily Kos' Devilstower, on the other hand, is angry that Dodd told Wolf Blitzer that he valued nat'l security more than human rights at the Dem debate: "The job of the president is to defend the Constitution. The Constitution first, the Constitution last, the Constitution always...Sitting aside the Constitution is the defeat of the nation, and any man or woman who doesn't understand that, should not be president. Was Blitzer trying to trap Dodd? Yes, and unfortunately, Dodd went for the bait."

GOP FIELD: Whodunit?

The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder thinks it is "unlikely that Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson or any top-tier challenger to Mitt Romney had anything to do" with the anti-Romney phone calls: "Think about the reward. Would the questions asked by the firm elicit any meaningful data for the campaign who wrote them? Would the relative reward of a few dozen voters changing their minds about Romney because of his Mormonism be worth the avalanche of embarassment and ill-will that would accrue to the candidate who authorized the phone calls?"

Soren Dayton examines the various theories and declares: "My money is on the third-party group. The density of connections suggest someone in the Romney political network."

Townhall's Hugh Hewitt, an avowed Romney supporter, thinks otherwise: "I suspect either extreme anti-Mormons unaffiliated with a candidate or a left wing 527 that is trying to take Romney out before it becomes obvious that the attack is coming from that direction. If as I believe the left understands Romney to be the anti-Hillary and the strongest candidate against her in the general, now would be the time to take him down via appeals to religious bigotry."

GOP FIELD II: If You Want Ideological Purity, You Won't Find It Here

Power Line's Paul Mirengoff examines the perils of relying solely on "electability" or "ideology" when deciding which GOP candidate to support: "Polls pitting Republican contenders against Hillary Clinton a year before the general election are not reliable. For one thing, they likely overstate the gap between the electability of well-known candidates like Giuliani and lesser known candidates like Romney...But it's also possible to outsmart oneself by selecting a candidate based on ideology. That's because perceived ideological differences among candidates may be more apparent than real. This risk seems particularly pronounced in this year's Republican race."

NRO's Ramesh Ponnuru examines the "four distinct styles of flip-flopping" of the leading GOP candidates and concludes: "If I had to judge the matter, I'd say that Thompson and Giuliani go about their flip-flopping with a bit more dishonesty than Romney and [John] McCain. But if you want edification, look away from the whole field."

After receiving angry e-mails from Fred Thompson supporters who disagreed with his article, Ponnuru defends his contention that Thompson has not always been pro-life: "Some readers object that it is an unduly narrow definition of 'pro-life' that denies the label to someone (such as the Thompson of the mid-'90s) merely for saying that he does not think abortion should generally be banned. And it is true that a person who favors keeping abortion legal can be an ally of pro-lifers in many, many battles, as Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison is and the late Senator Paul Coverdell was. But the basic debate over abortion has always been whether it should generally be legal or generally be prohibited. People who want it to stay legal are called pro-choicers. That's what Coverdell and Hutchison were, and it's what Thompson was. If Thompson still thinks that states should keep abortion legal, it's what he still is."

GIULIANI: What About Roe?

NRO's K-Lo thinks that Giuliani "definitely helped himself" by speaking to the Federalist Society Convention, but wonders why he didn't mention Roe v. Wade: "When Rudy went through a litany of 2nd Amendment, racial quotas, and keeping America's courtrooms safe for the Ten Commandments, I figured Roe-wrongly-decided had to be next. Nope."

In related Giuliani-blogging at The Corner, Romney-supporter Mark Steyn doesn't see why Giuliani would be more electable than Romney: "I can't see why, after solid wins in IA and NH, GOP primary victories in, say, Connecticut or Rhode Island would be beyond Mitt Romney. New Hampshire isn't exactly a 'socially conservative' bastion, and Mitt did manage to get himself elected in Massachusetts."

In another interesting post, NRO's Lisa Schiffren questions the power of the early primary states in the nominating process: "As many have said before me, neither Iowa nor New Hampshire, for different reasons, is terribly representative of anything but (some of) their neighboring states...I dunno -- to me it seems clear that the ability to appeal to a wide audience over time is a better indicator of who voters will respond to in an election, than the ability to organize the especially committed in states that conduct these quadrennial exercises. Ideally your candidate can do both -- as Hillary has been doing. The gap in our guys performance is what suggests trouble ahead."

MCCAIN: Probably Not The Endorsement He Wanted...

Andrew Sullivan follows up his endorsement of Barack Obama in the December issue of The Atlantic with an endorsement of John McCain in the Times of London. Linking to his column, Sullivan writes: "Compare two potential races next year: Clinton vs Giuliani or McCain vs Obama. One would bring out the worst in us; the other would move this country forward in desperately needed ways."

K-Lo links to Sullivan's column and teases: "Something Ramesh and Andrew Sullivan can agree on? John McCain for president."

THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Enough With The Reagan Nostalgia

Townhall's Patrick Ruffini thinks GOPers need to look forward, not back: "Look -- I unequivocally believe that Reagan was our best President since Lincoln. I spent my best time in college studying the Reagan Revolution. But the fact that we're turning our Presidential debates into a Reagan drinking game diminishes both Reagan and those who would hope to succeed him as conservatives in the White House...Incessant Reagan nostalgia tends to feed the notion that we have nothing new to offer the country; that when in doubt, we go back to the well of twenty years ago, to when it all began, rather than devise creative solutions for the future...None of the people running for President are Reagan. Let's just accept that and move on. If conservatism requires the second coming of Ronald Reagan to make progress, then we are in deep trouble."

LEST WE FORGET: The Chief Export Of Chuck Norris Is Pain

Mike Huckabee's new campaign ad. For more illuminating facts about Chuck Norris, visit Chuck Norris Facts.

Posted by Ian Faerstein at November 19, 2007 12:39 PM