Early 2007 All Over Again

After two uncomfortable days on race, the leading Democratic presidential candidates turned the set of issues that initially kicked of the cycle: judgment and Iraq.

On Meet the Press this morning, Clinton, for the first time, opened the lid:

What he was talking about was very directly about the story of Sen. Obama's campaign, being premised on a speech he gave in 2002 and that was to his credit. He gave a speech opposing the war in Iraq. He gave a very impassioned speech against it and consistently said that he was against the war, he would vote against the funding for the war. By 2003, that speech was off his website. By 2004, he was saying that he didn't really disagree with the way George Bush was conducting the war. And by 2005, 6, and 7, he was voting for $300 billion in funding for the war. The story of his campaign is really the story of that speech and his opposition to Iraq. I think it is fair to ask questions about, what did you do after the speech was over? And when he became a senator, he didn't go to the floor of the Senate to condemn the war in Iraq for 18 months. He didn't introduce legislation against the war in Iraq. He voted against timelines and deadlines initially. So I think it's important that we get the contrast and the comparisons out. I think that's fair game.

Clinton has no intention of persuading voters that Obama initially favored the war; the inconsistency itself isn't even the issue. What she's trying to do, as plain as day, is to puncture the defensive balloon that surrounds Obama's change message. Obama, she is really saying, isn't special: he's just like one of us. He tailors his rhetoric to match the political imperatives. The less special Obama becomes, the more vulnerable he comes to scrutiny by voters themselves.

I can't tell you how many voters in New Hampshire and Iowa would acknowledge that they might not know too much about Obama but were compelled to attend his events and support his candidacy because of the emotion he inspired in him.

The Clinton campaign directly criticizes Obama's movement at a huge risk: even Democrats who oppose his candidacy recognize that he's building something transcendent. (In this way, Bill Clinton's description of Obama's candidacy as a "fairy tale" sounded offensive even though Clinton was referring only to Obama's Iraq record. In the days ahead, Clinton will say nothing about Obama's inspirational story or about the movement that's sustaining his candidacy.

Obama, for his part, on a conference call with reporters later today, tried to stuff Clinton into the bottle he managed to create for Iowa:

...I have to say that she started this campaign saying that she wanted to make history and lately she has been spending a lot of time rewriting it. I know that in Washington it is acceptable to say or do anything it takes to get elected but I really don’t think that is the kind of politics that is good for our party and I don’t think it is good for our country and I think that the American people will reject it in this election. What I want to do is spend talking about how we are going to make sure that people who are losing their jobs get work. How are we going to make sure that our young people are going to afford college? How are we going to make sure that the sub-prime lending crisis does not lead to an all out recession? How are we going to create the kind of foreign policy that allows us to bring our troops home and makes us safer and goes after a genuine terrorist threat? Those are the issues that we are going to spend time talking about in this campaign and if Senator Clinton wants to be distracted by the sorts of political point scoring that was evident today then that is going to be her prerogative.

Both campaigns were ready for combat. Obama's press team sent out three rebuttal e-mails this morning and scheduled a conference call with key foreign policy hands. (The Clinton campaign responded with an afternoon conference call of its own.)

So Clinton and Obama are debating policy, rather than governing styles. Who do you suppose that benefits? (I don't really know...)