Oh-eight (D): Domestic v. foreign policy
Posted: Monday, December 17, 2007 9:21 AM by Domenico Montanaro
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Democrats
BIDEN: Per his campaign, Biden picked up endorsements yesterday from Keokuk, IA Mayor David Gudgel and New Hampshire state Rep. Bob Williams.
Yet Biden “admitted that it was disappointing to lose [the Des Moines Register’s] nod after some lauded him as having the best performance at a debate sponsored by the newspaper. ‘The paper was fair to me. They really gave me a shot,’ he said. ‘I honestly thought we were in the race.’”
Biden is making the case for foreign policy experience for the next president. (Anyone else noticed that as domestic issues have become more dominant on the campaign trail, the buzz for Richardson, Biden, and Dodd has started to die down? Those three candidates desperately needed this campaign to be about foreign policy from day one.)
CLINTON: The New York Times front-pages, "Mr. Clinton is not running his wife’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. But less than three weeks before the Iowa caucuses, and with polls showing a tight race, he has become the most powerful force in her political operation besides the candidate herself." The piece also notes that Bill is still upset at the media's treatment of Hillary and Obama. "They say he allowed that frustration to spill over on ‘The Charlie Rose Show’ on Friday night, when he criticized the news media as forgoing tough scrutiny of Mr. Obama. The advisers said he also believed that the Obama camp was persuading the reporters to focus on gaffes by his wife and her campaign, like the recent Clinton campaign statement that Mr. Obama harbored presidential ambitions even in kindergarten, and a campaign official’s remark last week about Mr. Obama’s past drug use."
More on Bill from an anonymous aide: “‘He is brilliant in sizing up the political challenge and giving advice; he is a little rusty at execution, and his impatience and anxiety seems even worse when it comes to Hillary than when he was running himself,’ said one longtime senior adviser who worked on both Clintons’ campaigns, and who spoke on condition of anonymity.”
And some more Bill news… “Securities and Exchange Commission documents and financial- disclosure forms filed by Hillary Clinton show that Bill Clinton, 61, has a financial stake in three investment entities registered in the Cayman Islands by Burkle's Yucaipa Cos. LLC. In 2004, Hillary Clinton, a New York senator, said she wanted to ‘close the loopholes’ for ‘people who create a mailbox, or a drop, or send one person to sit on the beach in some island paradise and claim that it is their offshore headquarters.’”
Bill, the cowboy? The New York Post depicts 10-gallon-hat-wearing, gun-slinging Bill Clinton spouting off shot after shot against Obama on Charlie Rose. The Post calls him, “Wild Bill.” It's not great for a campaign when the press is writing about a "new Clinton campaign" just 17 days before Iowa.
USA Today’s header: "New Clinton campaign out to show her likeability."
The campaign is calling the Iowa 99-county blitz by surrogates the "Hillary I know" tour. Another attempt to reintroduce the candidate? But do Iowans believe they don't know her? Or can the campaign convince these folks that they don't know her?
It's a Web site too.
In New Hampshire Saturday, Clinton “turned to a simple equation Saturday to re-energize a campaign that's suddenly locked in a tight struggle with Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., here. Woman equals change.”
In a barn at the second stop of her five-day tour of Iowa, NBC/NJ’s Athena Jones reports, Clinton briefly lost her voice, something she called an occupational hazard of politics. Clinton -- like her husband famously did -- has lost her voice several times on the campaign trail, most notably at an early November event in New Hampshire with Bob Vila when she joked that she sounded like the actress Tallulah Bankhead.
EDWARDS: The campaign hopes Mari Culver is as good of a surrogate as the former Iowa first lady Christie Vilsack was for John Kerry in 2004. In her endorsement, the Des Moines Register writes, she'll make the case for Edwards' electability. “‘I think John is a winner. He's electable,’ she said. ‘He's been tested. He's been on the national ticket before. The national polls show him beating all Republicans in the general elections. He inspires me. I think he inspires other Iowans, and I think he can really rally Americans in the fall.’”
KUCINICH: The New Hampshire Union Leader profiles Kucinich and describes him as, “Small and intense, the 61-year-old Democratic congressman from Ohio prides himself on taking a strong stand on issues.”
OBAMA: NBC/NJ's Aswini Anburajan notes that a lot has been written over the weekend about Obama's latest "sprint" across Iowa. Obama has been hitting four to five towns and small cities a day, traveling across the northern part of the state where Democrats are often as few and far between as the far-flung Iowa farms his bus lumbers through. At the end of six days Obama will have visited 22 cities in 22 counties in Iowa.
But despite this being John Edwards' country, Obama's message appears to be catching on. Voters are readily saying they will support him as they leave the town halls. He's still attracting large crowds, and he often brings them to their feet for a standing ovation. Part of the reason could be that support has solidified, and Obama is attracting his own supporters at each stop. Many times when the senator asks how many undecided caucus-goers are in a room, there are only a handful in the crowd.
The noticeable difference in Obama from the perspective of those who've been following him day to day for four months now is his energy level. The senator is no longer dragging at the end of a day; instead, he's improvising and throwing in jokes. His stump speech is actually longer, but it's far more pointed and compelling than it has been before.
There is also a populist appeal to Obama's message here. Two of the supporters that introduced Obama yesterday at Algona and Emmetsburg had the same text, emphasizing that Obama came from a working-class background and was raised by his grandparents and a single mother, and that he had little contact with his father growing up. Obama began his first town hall on Sunday with a speech on his tax plan, which provides tax relief for the middle class. He provided specifics like saying that 100,000 Iowa seniors would have their income taxes eliminated if his plan was put into place.
And speaking of John Edwards, it appears that the cordial relationship that he and Obama share may be fraying at the edges as the two exchanged barbs over the weekend on the most effective way to pass universal health-care legislation. While Obama's campaign has said that he raised the issue because Edwards attacked him on it, Obama was pushing a message that showed the significant contrast between him and Edwards -- the difference between the rhetoric of fighting the special interests and the realities of needing to work with the health insurance and pharmaceutical companies to actually pass a meaningful bill.
Paul Krugman has another tough column on Obama -- this one criticizes the candidate for not realizing what it may take to get something done. Krugman concludes: "And nothing Mr. Obama has said suggests that he appreciates the bitterness of the battles he will have to fight if he does become president, and tries to get anything done."
The New York Post: “US Sen. Bob Kerrey just couldn't help himself from applauding Barack Obama after endorsing Hillary Rodham Clinton in Iowa yesterday - until he gave a left-handed compliment that almost sounded like it was cooked up in Clinton's headquarters. ‘I like the fact that his name is Barack Hussein Obama, and that his father was a Muslim and that his paternal grandmother is a Muslim,’ Kerrey told The Washington Post. ‘There's a billion people on the planet that are Muslims, and I think that experience is a big deal.’”
RICHARDSON: The candidate touted his electability. "‘I can bring in four states that usually vote Republican,’ Richardson said, referring to New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and Nevada. ‘If Senator Kerry had won those and still lost Ohio, he'd be president today.’”
