Oh-eight (D): Obama targets Bill?
Posted: Tuesday, October 16, 2007 9:13 AM by Mark Murray
Filed Under:
Democrats
The new USA/Today Gallup poll has Clinton leading the Dem field at 50%, followed by Obama at 21%, Edwards at 13%, and Richardson at 4%.
CLINTON: She launched her second ad in South Carolina “focusing on her plan to make college more affordable and preschool available to all children.”
OK, if this isn't an example of micro-targeting, then we don't know what is. Former Young and the Restless star Victoria Powell is stumping in Iowa on behalf of Clinton. She was in Waterloo over the weekend.
You never know when one of these stories gets legs.
The Hill reports on how some Republicans are seizing on a buried allegation in the Gerth/Van Natta Clinton book that she listened to an illegally obtained recording of Clinton critics during the '92 campaign. “Gerth told The Hill that he learned of the incident in 2006 when he interviewed a former campaign aide present at the tape playing. He has not revealed the aide’s identity. Clinton’s campaign has not disputed any facts reported in the final version of his book, which became public this spring, he said. ‘It hasn’t been challenged,’ said Gerth. ‘There hasn’t been one fact in the book that’s been challenged.’”
EDWARDS: On getting the endorsement of 10 local SEIU chapters, Edwards said, “We will have people and organizers and support for what we’re trying to do here. No one will out-organize us in Iowa.”
OBAMA: Obama is now going after the OTHER Clinton, NBC/NJ’s Aswini Anburajan reports. At a rally in Madison, Wisconsin yesterday, Obama said, “We've had enough of ... triangulation and poll-driven politics. That's not what we need right now.” The triangulation term was coined during the Clinton Administration, when advisers to the president urged him to split the difference between opposing views in policy proposals.
This isn’t the first time that Obama has referred to the “other” Clinton. Just two weeks ago in New Hampshire, Obama quoted Bill Clinton to prove that too much experience in Washington is a bad thing. “The same old experience is not relevant… And you can have the right kind of experience and the wrong kind of experience,” Obama told the crowd in Concord, adding in his punch line that this was a quote from when Bill Clinton was running for office in 1992.
The rhetoric directed towards the Clintons from Obama has increased, Anburajan adds, and the distinctions he’s drawing are not just issue-based. In Newton, Iowa on Oct. 12, Obama told the crowd, “There are other candidates in this race who are a lot more cautious, they will poll every questions in this race before the say a word.” And the next day at the Sisters on Target Dinner in Des Moines, Obama said, “I'm not going to win just by being the most calculating politician in this race.”
The Chicago Sun-Times also reports on Obama railing against “triangulation.”
The Boston Globe's Derrick Jackson writes, "The first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses have emerged as perhaps the only chance for Obama or any other candidate to stop Hillary Clinton's nomination."
The Chicago Tribune does the "how Obama's ground game is different from Dean's ground game in '04" story.
The Quad Cities Times, meanwhile, looks at Obama's religious outreach. "Beyond the forums, the campaign stages a weekly interfaith prayer conference call, runs a "People of Faith for Barack" Web site and has a page on FaithBase.com, a social networking site modeled on Facebook and MySpace.”
Also, a Chicago Trib reporter was booted from Michelle Obama's London fundraiser yesterday.
