Clinton vs. Obama
Posted: Monday, November 19, 2007 9:20 AM by Mark Murray
So was Obama simply trying to change the subject from the Thursday debate? Or does the campaign believe that anytime they can paint Clinton as a "Washington" politician, it's a good day for them? Or are the Obama folks simply pressing and therefore a bit testy?
The San Francisco Chronicle reached Bob Novak and asked him about the item he wrote over the weekend, which asserted that the Clinton campaign is sitting on some type of scandalous story about Obama. "Novak would not reveal the source of the item but said the information did not come directly from the Clinton camp. "(It) was said to Democratic sources ... by people inside the Clinton campaign," he said. "It was not specified what it was, and it was said to a Democratic source. Clinton would not reveal it because she is such a good person."
Novak told FOX this morning, “There were no Republicans involved in my reporting on this.”
The back-and-forth made it into the Des Moines Register. "Obama insisted in Iowa on Sunday that his campaign's swift and public response to a published rumor of personal scandal was aimed at putting the issue to rest. ‘The fact is, we are letting Democratic voters know, and we are letting Republican operatives know, and we're letting other people know that we will respond swiftly and forcefully when there's untruths being told about me,’ Obama told reporters before a campaign event in Marion.”
“Questions about Obama's response to Novak's column eclipsed the candidate's planned message during the news conference at the outset of a two-day Iowa campaign swing. Obama said that the Clinton campaign's claim that he had been duped by a Republican scheme was ‘silly.’ ‘Something gets on the Internet and it's halfway around the world before you blink an eye,’ he said, noting attacks on 2004 Democratic nominee John Kerry's record in Vietnam. ‘We think it's very important to be very clear about how we're not going to tolerate it.’”
The Chicago Sun-Times also covers the back-and-forth.