Howard Wolfson is, yet again, proven to be an ass:
Wolfson, in yet another sign that some Clinton acolytes are having difficulty letting go of the past, caused a stir by telling ABC News that his boss would have captured the Democratic nod had Edwards been forced to the sidelines before the Iowa caucuses in early January.
"I believe we would have won Iowa, and Clinton today would therefore have been the nominee," the often pugnacious Wolfson said.
Au contraire, argues David Redlawsk -- head of the University of Iowa's Hawkeye Poll and, in the walk-up to the caucuses, himself an Edwards backer.
An e-mail sent today by the school's news service says that polling on caucus night supervised by Redlawsk indicated "that the absence of Edwards would have helped (Barack) Obama."
The survey, which quizzed a randomly selected caucus participant in every Iowa precinct, asked the voters about their second-choice preferences. Among the 82% of Edwards supporters willing to back someone else, 51% named Obama as their next choice, 32% picked Clinton.
Wolfson's claim "that two-thirds of Edwards supporters would have supported Clinton is just not supported in data collected directly from those who actually participated in the caucuses," Redlawsk says in the e-mail. "Had Edwards not been running, and if nothing else had changed, my data suggest that Obama would have ended up even further ahead of Clinton than he was."...
"Redlawsk noted that by the time Iowa's county conventions rolled around March 15, Edwards had dropped out. Many Edwards delegations remained a separate viable group, but where they did not, the move to Obama was massive. In the end, Obama picked up nearly half of Edwards supporters, while Clinton picked up almost none.
All the sour grapes and excuses in the world can't hide the obvious fact that emerges from Joshua Green's analysis of the Clinton internal memos - despite running on her supposedly excellent managerial skills, it was ironically the conflict and chaos she was unable to quell within her own campaign that doomed her run. The Edwards scandal offers a convenient chance for Clinton insiders to try to deflect that obvious truth, but no matter how hard they spin it, no one is buying.