Oh-eight (D): Obama on Hillary, John
Posted: Friday, November 09, 2007 9:17 AM by Domenico Montanaro
Filed Under:
Democrats
BIDEN: “While most presidential candidates have been talking tough about Iran lately, Joe Biden, a Democratic senator from Delaware,
refocused his foreign policy agenda on Pakistan at a Saint Anselm College forum yesterday. He criticized President Bush's handling of that country's current constitutional crisis, and outlining a comprehensive alternative, he took the country as a case study of how the administration has squandered America's moral standing in the world,” the Concord Monitor writes.
CLINTON: The
New York Times: “Former President Bill Clinton said Thursday that he should receive more blame than his wife for the failed attempt to revamp the nation’s health care system more than a decade ago. ‘You know how much she cares about this,” Mr. Clinton told an audience in Glenwood, Iowa, according to an account on MSNBC. ‘She has taken the rap for some of the problems we had with health care the last time that were far more my fault than hers.’”
Following Bill on the campaign trail, the
Politico writes about his “unexpected difficultly with the media” as of late. “Though Clinton is justifiably heralded as perhaps the quintessential retail politician and political communicator of his generation, contemporary political coverage -- broken up as it is into tiny blog items and wire dispatches, further chewed on by partisan blogs and opposition research shops -- doesn't favor his style. While his wife thrives on the clarity of simple declarations -- ‘If President Bush doesn't end this war, I will’ -- the former president is always more oblique. He plays jazz to her classical music, as one longtime Clinton associate puts it.”
Clinton yesterday signaled her support for the Peru trade deal. And in a statement,
Edwards jumped all over it. “I am terribly disappointed by Senator Clinton’s support for the Peru trade deal. At a time when millions of Americans are concerned about losing their jobs and the economy, it is dismaying that Senator Clinton would side with corporations, their lobbyists and the Bush Administration in support of a flawed trade deal that expands the NAFTA model.”
“A fear among Democratic candidates has been growing along with Clinton's lead in the Democratic presidential primary, though few care to talk about it on the record,”
Time reports in its article on Clinton called “Lightning Rod.” More from the piece: “Democrats worry that those fragile gains [of 2006] could be difficult to hold in 2008 if one of the most polarizing figures in politics is at the top of the ticket.”
“Says a purple-state Congressman who is nervous about holding onto his seat if Clinton is the nominee: ‘She certainly will get Republicans riled up. They will not only go out and vote against her--they'll stop off at their neighbors' house along the way and drag them to the polls.’ And another: "No one wants to talk about her down-ticket effect for fear she'll win," a purple state Democratic official says, "and she'll take it out on you."
Per NBC/NJ’s Athena Jones, Clinton -- who has been suffering from a cough she blames in part on seasonal allegories and spending a lot of time on planes -- cut short her stump speech at her last campaign event yesterday of her two-day swing through New Hampshire to answer questions on nuclear weapons, scouting, gun control and other issues. Clinton spoke for only about 6 minutes, listing the bullet points from her usual 30 or 35 minute-long speech, before asking audience members to step up to the microphones set up for questions.
Clinton “has won tens of millions of dollars more in federal earmarks this year than her rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination, even though two of them have significantly more Senate seniority,”
The Hill newspaper reports.
The
New York Times writes about the Clinton campaign’s own fact-check Web page. The campaign yesterday “introduced a Web site dedicated exclusively to the instantaneous rebuttal of charges or news reports it deems offensive or wrong. And the day offered a perfect opportunity for the campaign, with a potentially embarrassing mini-scandal: a waitress’s report that Mrs. Clinton had failed to tip after eating at a Maid-Rite diner in central Iowa, an assertion that ricocheted around the Internet on Thursday.” (FYI: the site linked to First Read’s own reporting to debunk the story.)
The
New York Post: “John Podesta -- former President Bill Clinton's chief of staff -- filed papers yesterday to create a new '527' organization expected to pump millions into TV ads and efforts to get Democrats to the polls.”
DODD: The
Concord Monitor writes about Dodd’s time in the Peace Corps.
EDWARDS: Caucus for Priorities, a group with 10,000 Iowans pledged to caucus for the candidate it chooses to endorse, is set to back Edwards today. The group is the Iowa arm of Priorities Action Fund, which is focused on cutting the Pentagon’s budget by 15% and reallocating the money to other areas like education, health, housing and the environment.
“We have lots of friends in this race but only one champion,” wrote Ben Cohen, creator of Priorities Action Fund and the founder of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream. “Without question, John Edwards is the most committed and best prepared to bring about the kind of real change Washington desperately needs. John Edwards is uniquely qualified to take on Washington lobbyists and defense contractors and break the stranglehold they have on the nation’s pocketbook and reins of power.” The group took into account electability, a questionnaire, and an online poll of the 10,000 pledges.
OBAMA: In an interview with the
Washington Post while campaigning in Iowa, Obama took on Clinton and Edwards, “arguing that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) cannot appeal to independents and Republicans as effectively as he can and asserting that former senator John Edwards's populist message does not square with his record.”
More: “Obama spoke frankly about the difficult balancing act of drawing ever sharper distinctions with his opponents, particularly Clinton, without succumbing to going negative to overtake a front-runner. ‘I want to campaign the same way I govern, which is to respond directly and forcefully with the truth,’ Obama said. ‘That means I'm not going to paint a caricature of Senator Clinton. I think she's a smart, able person. I think anybody who tries to paint her as all negative is engaging in caricature, and when you start slipping into that mode, it's hard to come back.’”
But Obama faced his own questions yesterday, the
Des Moines Register reports. “At least three people at two campaign stops called into question whether Obama, with less than two months from Iowa’s Jan. 3 primary, can overcome Clinton’s advantage over fellow Democrats in national polls.” Obama responded “that he doesn’t carry the same political baggage as Clinton, a former first lady whose health plan reform in the 1990s failed. That, he said, makes him a better candidate. But he needs a good showing in Iowa and New Hampshire, the first-in-the-nation caucus or primary states, to convince the rest of the nation, he said. ‘This state is very important to me, this town is very important to me. That’s how we’ll win,’ Obama said in Fairfield.”
The
Boston Globe front-pages whether or not black voters in South Carolina have confidence in Obama with this headline: “Politics of doubt gnaw at black voters in S.C.” " ‘Personally, I don't think he has a chance in hell,’ said Leah Josey, a 20-year-old English major at Morris College, a Baptist school in Sumter. ‘All those white people? Come on.’” More: “Such sentiments are prevalent among black South Carolinians, who are expected to make up nearly half of voters in the Democratic primary in January. Nearly a third of black voters surveyed in a statewide poll in September said white Americans would not vote for a black presidential candidate.”
And the
Chicago Tribune has this: “Although Obama has suggested in recent days that Clinton should do more to push for the release of archival documents from her time as first lady, he defended his own lack of a document retention procedure from his Illinois Senate days, saying he had a staff of just one. ‘Whatever remaining documents that I have are inevitably incomplete and then the question is going to be where's this, where's that,’ he said. ‘Once I start heading down that road, then it puts me in a position that could end up being misleading.’”
