Oh-eight (D): Obama's jabs at HRC
Posted: Wednesday, July 18, 2007 9:17 AM by Domenico Montanaro
Filed Under:
Democrats
Yesterday, the AFL-CIO announced it will host a presidential forum with the top seven Democratic candidates -- Biden, Clinton, Dodd, Edwards, Kucinich, Obama, and Richardson (no Gravel) -- in Chicago. The forum, which will be aired on MSNBC and moderated by MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, is being held the day before the AFL-CIO will decide whether it convenes its General Board this fall to consider an endorsement.
The Chicago Tribune reports that Elizabeth Edwards, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama were all featured guest speakers at yesterday’s Planned Parenthood Action Fund event in D.C. With each speaking offering their (or in their husband’s, in Elizabeth’s case) health care proposals, it was Clinton who provided the most “bruising critique of Bush administration policies and Republican conservatives on abortion rights and contraception policy.”
CLINTON:
Newsweek's Meadows interviews every candidate that has ever faced Clinton in an election (including her high school student council opponent) to find out how one beats Clinton. "There’s a reason she hasn’t lost an election since she ran for president of the student council in high school. She does her homework; she doesn’t do gaffes. Anyone running against her would be wise not to count on an implosion. So if she won’t do herself in, how can she be beaten?" Newsweek offers up 10 ideas.
Her campaign is mailing out DVDs to Iowa Democrats “that explains her plan to end the war in Iraq.”
DODD:
He told a New Hampshire crowd he opposed “a single-payer health-care system” which
did not sit well with some audience members. The president of the town’s historical society even called him “waffly” and said his plan didn't make much sense to me, truthfully.” One way to get buzz in N.H.? Find a town that no candidate has ever visited. Dodd apparently did that yesterday in
Grantham, N.H. And he got 50+ folks to show up.
Here's something that is hard to believe simply because we don't believe there's a single candidate who, if offered, would turn down the vice presidency. That said, Dodd claims he'd rather stay in the Senate than take the second slot.
EDWARDS:
In his speech today that will serve as an exclamation mark on his three-day poverty tour that ends today, Edwards will say per excerpts released by the campaign: “Poverty is not a New Orleans problem or a Pittsburgh problem or an Appalachia problem. This is an American problem. And it's America¹s responsibility. In a nation of our wealth, it's just wrong that we have 37 million people living in poverty. What we do about the millions of Americans who wake up every day literally worried about feeding and clothing their kids says something about the content and character of our soul."
Yet the Politico’s Roger Simon wonders if running to eradicate poverty is a winning issue for Edwards. “Just under 13 percent of the U.S. population lives in poverty, a shockingly high figure in a nation where hundreds of thousands of people recently lined up for the privilege of buying a $599 iPhone. But the American middle class is vastly larger, probably about 75 percent of the population. Further, middle-class Americans, unlike poor Americans, have time and money to give to political campaigns. Which is why most presidential campaigns prefer to champion middle-class causes, while paying only lip service to poor causes.”
The Washington Times writes that those along the stops of Edwards’s poverty tour are looking to the candidate to alter public perception of poverty. “’The coverage Mr. Edwards might receive from this could actually be an opportunity to showcase some of the positive things that we have accomplished in the last 40 years,’ said Paul Hunt Thompson, former sheriff and county judge executive.”
If name recognition is everything, this is not a good sign for Edwards. Per the Boston Globe’s Political Intelligence blog, “local residents thanked him for paying attention to the plight of the have-nots [during his poverty tour]. But they didn't always use the right name.” The mayor of Marks, MS called him “Senator Kennedy” when she handed him the key to the city. In Memphis, a woman speaking to an audience about Edwards referred to him as “Senator Obama.” She quickly realized her mistake and recanted.
Not that Edwards would shy away from the name, Kennedy. In fact, it’s a comparison he’s invited and the Chicago Tribune helps out the cause -- to a point, comparing Edwards’s poverty platform to the legacy of Robert F. Kennedy. There is “a faint echo of the lengthy tours that Robert F. Kennedy made before his assassination in 1968.” The Tribune, though, also touches on the dangers of leaning on such a legacy. “’With any Kennedy, there's a large measure of calculation, but there was also a sincerity,’" while, with Edwards, political calculation has been perceived as more blatant.
In an interview with the Washington Post, "Edwards defended himself against criticism that his expensive haircuts and lucrative income from a hedge fund undercut his campaign's effort to highlight the issue of poverty in America." Edwards on the haircut coverage: "Anybody who's running for president ought to be subjected to serious examination from every conceivable angle," Edwards said. "So there’s nothing wrong with that. What bothers me about this is, I don't want whatever personal criticism people have of me to detract in any way from the people whose lives were trying to help. That's the only thing about it that's troublesome." Also of note, Edwards once again said he was the most electable Dem but "would not directly address possible weaknesses of Clinton or Obama, the two leading Democratic candidates, as general election nominees.”
Elizabeth Edwards continues to be the Edwards that can grab headlines. The NY Daily News paraphrases her with the headline, “My hubby’s the feminist.” Taking a shot at Clinton, Elizabeth Edwards told Salon.com, "Keeping [the] door open to women is actually more a policy of John's than Hillary's.”
The NY Post also tags Elizabeth Edwards comments as a shot at Clinton with the headline: “Broad-sided.” They also have this “Elizabeth vs. Hillary” tale-of-the-tape graphic.
The NY Times on her comments in Salon: “Her comments to Salon were her most overtly critical to date of Mrs. Clinton and seemed intended to puncture the Clinton campaign’s support among Democratic women. Polls suggest that Mrs. Clinton holds sway over unmarried, blue-collar women, the same voters to whom Mrs. Edwards’s husband, former Senator John Edwards, is trying to appeal.”
And it wasn’t just in the Salon piece where Elizabeth Edwards went after Clinton. She did it on the campaign trail in Iowa, where she campaigned with Kate Michelman. “’Maybe she's staying away from some of those issues described as female issues,’ Elizabeth Edwards said of Clinton, after speaking to a crowd of about 150 people -- most of them women,” per the Des Moines Register. “Edwards equated Clinton's pursuit of the White House with her own early days as an attorney, when she steered away from women's issues so she would be taken seriously by men. ‘I'm not criticizing her,’ Edwards said. ‘She's got a pretty hard maze to walk through.’”
The AP reports on the new TV ad the Edwards campaign will be running in New Hampshire, which features Elizabeth. “Elizabeth Edwards tells voters her husband, Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards, is a tough guy 'who can stare the worst in the face and not blink' in an ad set to start airing Wednesday in New Hampshire… 'I have been blessed for the last 30 years to be married to the most optimistic person that I have ever met,' she says as photographs from the campaign fade in and out. 'But at the same time he has an unbelievable toughness, particularly about other people, and that is his ability to fight for them.'”
OBAMA: AP's Pickler notes that Obama has been increasing his critiques of Clinton. They "have been regular but subtle reminders that for all his campaign money and promises of hope, he still trails her in most national and early state polls. And when you're No. 2, the only option is to chip away at the front-runner." But the examples Pickler uses are not exactly blistering attacks, more like college debate barbs.
-- He "rejected the notion that she's more prepared for the job."
-- He "repeatedly reminded voters that she supported the Iraq war resolution, trying to cut off any credit she might get for trying to repeal the authorization now."
-- He "pushed back at Clinton's efforts to portray herself as a candidate for change." (If these are what qualifies as attacks, then it's going to be a very boring campaign for those who love hardball politics.)
USA Today notes how the Illinois senator is trying to woo voters in neighboring Iowa. “The biracial Chicago senator grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia and carries his Kenyan father's name. But rural Iowa reminds him of rural Illinois, he says. And Iowa voters remind him of his late mother and grandparents, who were from Kansas. ‘The culture of Iowa's very familiar to me,’ Obama said in a weekend interview. ‘Common sense. Not a lot of pretense. … That's the kind of atmosphere that I grew up in. A lot of these folks look like my grandparents.’”
The campaign confirms that Oprah Winfrey will host a fundraiser for Obama in California on September 8.
Richardson: He told a New Hampshire crowd he would “get us out of the war” and that he would shut down the Guantanamo Bay prison.
