Oh-eight (D): Hearts vs. minds
Posted: Tuesday, November 13, 2007 9:15 AM by Domenico MontanaroDemocrats
The Boston Globe’s Canellos looks at the battle for Democratic hearts (Obama) and minds (Clinton). “No candidate in recent memory has embodied the deepest hopes of so many Democrats [as Obama]. Yet it's hard for some to watch the Illinois senator without also thinking of their fears -- the fear, frankly, that Obama is too vulnerable to Republican attacks to be a safe choice for his party's nomination.” More: “With many Democrats' hearts pinned to one candidate, and their brains perhaps leaning toward another one, the Clinton-Obama fight for this year's nomination will be no ordinary beauty contest. It will be an intense, ongoing struggle within the consciences of Democratic voters.”
CLINTON: The campaign sought to downplay Bill Clinton's "those boys have been getting tough" on his wife, comment yesterday. The campaign said it was Clinton being a southerner , not playing the gender card. "While some Clinton advisers say they would like to move on from the discussion of the candidate’s sex, Mr. Clinton’s use of the word ‘boys’ caught the attention of the Republican National Committee, which alerted reporters to it, and of the campaigns of Senator Barack Obama and John Edwards. Operatives in all three camps argued that the Clintons were keeping a ‘boys vs. girl’ story line alive to try to stoke sympathy for Mrs. Clinton -- something Clinton advisers emphatically deny."
The Politico's Roger Simon writes on the question-planting story, and he notes that the real distrust this raises is that of the campaign staff for the candidate. "Because when staffers plant questions, it means they don't trust the candidate to handle herself in public. They don't think she can answer real questions from real people.
The Boston Globe reports, “A dispute over limits that Bill and Hillary Clinton have placed on the National Archives' ability to release their White House records is highlighting a consequence of family dynasties in contemporary American politics: A president has sweeping power to keep potentially embarrassing documents from past administrations a secret.” One of George W. Bush’s “first acts was to slow the scheduled release of his father's papers from the Reagan-Bush and Bush-Quayle administrations.” He also “asserted executive privilege to maintain the secrecy of several Reagan-era documents related to the Iran-Contra scandal.” That means “similarly, should Hillary Clinton become president in 2009, she would exercise sweeping power over what documents from her husband's administration can be made public.”
The RNC says it’s today launching a “Clinton Library Lockdown Petition .”
On the trail in Iowa yesterday, Clinton promised she'd call for a “timeout " on trade agreements. But what does a "timeout" actually mean?
DODD: Yesterday, a Dodd spokeswoman issued this response regarding Clinton’s statement that she would call a “time out” on trade with other countries if elected president: Last week she said she would support President Bush's Peruvian free trade agreement. On Saturday at the Iowa Jefferson Jackson Dinner, Senator Clinton said she stands now where she's always stood. Today she confirmed it: on both sides of every issue."
EDWARDS: The New York Times attempts to capture the pressure Edwards is feeling. "Lagging in national polls less than two months before the Iowa caucus, Mr. Edwards is a man racing against the clock, hammering out miles over long stretches of countryside in a campaign that his spokesman, Mark Kornblau, says is dictated by a ‘flat-out, hard-charging schedule.’ With his campaign sustained by public financing, Mr. Edwards has only recently bought television time for advertising, and so has been racing from one gathering of potential voters to the next."
"Edwards and his staff members are exceeding his rivals in terrain and time, having rolled through all 99 counties and spent nearly 60 days in Iowa alone since late December, when he announced his candidacy. He has hit towns so off the beaten path that a Des Moines Register columnist, David Yepsen, called them places ‘where Democrats are ordinarily found only on endangered species lists.’”
Today, the campaign will announce a second wave of Iowa TV ads featuring Edwards' plan to hold Congress accountable for passing universal health care within six months of him taking office. Edwards says in the ad , which will run statewide in Iowa: “When I'm president I'm going to say to members of Congress and members of my administration, including my Cabinet: I'm glad that you have health care coverage and your family has health care coverage, but if you don't pass universal health care by July of 2009 -- in six months -- I'm going to use my power as president to take your health care away from you.”
The New York Times’ Zeleny reports, "So how is John Edwards feeling about Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York these days? So bad, apparently, that in an interview last week he twice refused to say whether he would endorse her should she win the Democratic presidential nomination. It is a standard political question, which often comes with a standard answer. And it is highly unusual for a candidate to decline to answer whether he would ultimately support the party’s nominee."
Edwards yesterday unveiled his plan for veterans with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. “Under Edwards' plan, veterans could seek counseling for post-traumatic stress disorder outside the Veterans Health Administration system; the number of counselors would increase; and family members would be employed to identify cases of PTSD.”
Edwards is still focusing on Nevada -- more so than some think, and he's got pretty good non-Vegas support in the state.
GORE: Any Democratic hope of Al Gore jumping into the presidential race are now dashed with the news that the Nobel Peace Prize winner has taken a job with a Silicon Valley venture capital firm.
OBAMA: The Washington Post profiles the Illinois senator. "Those who know Sen. Barack Obama best swear that this is nothing new: Trailing a powerful name in politics, hurrying to build an organization from scratch, struggling to overcome skepticism that he will ever catch up. ‘You know what? The same thing in the U.S. Senate race,’ Michelle Obama said of her husband in a recent interview. ‘The exact same scenario. This is Barack's political career.’”
More: "Yet one of the singular aspects of Obama's rapid political rise is that he accomplished it without becoming controversial, without being bloodied -- indeed, with hardly a scratch, even in rough-and-tumble Chicago, one of America's most famously political cities. He cut a path largely independent of the Democratic machine, its ward bosses and its byzantine rules of succession. Apart from one disastrous decision to run for Congress, he advanced with strong campaigns and some fortuitous implosions by his rivals."
Per the Union Leader , Obama “vowed to end the war in Iraq within 16 months, refocus the military on the fight with al-Qaeda and engage in diplomacy with enemies of the United States. ‘Not only do I want to end the war in Iraq, I want to end the mindset that got us there,’ he said."
The AP looks at Obama’s role in getting death penalty laws changed in Illinois. “Enactment of the 2003 law was a huge political achievement in a state that had been deeply divided over problems with capital punishment. Obama was at the center of the emotional debate. Legislators and lobbyists who worked with him describe a lawmaker who was personally involved, refused to abandon some needed changes but also demanded compromises from both law enforcement and death penalty critics.”
In an interview on MSNBC , Michelle Obama told Mika Brzezinski that “black America will wake up and get it,” predicting that the surveys showing lackluster African American support for Obama are “not going to hold.” Also, after Barack Obama’s success at Saturday’s Iowa Democratic Party dinner and a Sunday appearance on Meet the Press, his campaign is capitalizing on the recent gains over Clinton, setting an $850,000 Internet fundraising goal.
Per NBC’s Andy Merten, while Obama delivered a toned-down version of his anti-Washington establishment jabs at Hillary Clinton while speaking to reporters yesterday, Obama strategist David Axelrod repeated some of the campaign’s charges on MSNBC’s Hardball last night. “Senator Clinton is a very, very proficient politician,” he told host Chris Matthews, adding: “They’re running a textbook campaign, but it’s a campaign that’s designed to get you through an election -- it’s not designed to bring the country together; it’s not designed to solve problems.”RICHARDSON: Even though Florida is being ignored by the Democratic candidates, the Miami Herald is still running profiles of all the candidates. Here's its Richardson write-up .
