I'd like to thank Icebergslim for another very comprehensive Obama week-in-review diary. I will look forward each Sunday for future installments, and I hope that supporters of other candidates will offer similarly comprehensive reviews of their candidates’ weeks. Such diaries are helpful to many of us.
There’s a lot of new information. Here are the three recent '08 campaign moments that I pick out as most significant:
- A good week for Clinton was maybe a better week for Obama, particularly in the latest New Hampshire poll numbers.
- Obama bounced back well from an “adversity moment” about sex ed for kindergartners, and made Romney eat from his own “ocean of filth.”
- The “open mic” flap may turn out to have been a paradigm moment in the ’08 campaign.
Details at the jump…
1. A good week for Clinton was maybe a better week for Obama, particularly in the latest New Hampshire poll numbers.
The narrowing of the Clinton-Obama gap in New Hampshire (from 15 percent in June to 9 percent in July, according to the CNN-WMUR-UNH poll) is statistically significant. Bill Clinton’s return to New Hampshire couldn’t offset the series positive bounces that Obama has enjoyed over the past month, including more than his Q2 fundraising triumph.
What will be interesting are the next surveys to come out of Iowa (there are no July poll numbers publicly available yet from there; in June, Obama ran consistently third behind Edwards and Clinton in the Hawkeye State). If he gets any bump in the next Iowa polls, we may be looking at a broader trend.
Nationwide, Clinton is still up by an average of 12.1 points: there is no evident recent movement there. The early movement will be in the early caucus and primary states, where voters start paying attention sooner. And they will likely presage subsequent national shifts.
Hillary’s good couple of days this week were noted in the center column by Kos. Yet, as inferred by the title, if it’s news that Clinton has two good days, it’s evidently in the context of a string of bad ones.
So what offset the positives of Bill Clinton’s return to the campaign trail to dampen Senator Clinton’s numbers (and boost Senator Obama’s) in the Granite State?
The fundraising (with record number of small donors) certainly helped. But I sense that as Democratic primary voters pay more attention (as occurs earlier in New Hampshire than most states) they are sizing Obama up and they increasingly like what they see.
My second point brings an example…
2. Obama bounced back well from an “adversity moment” about sex ed for kindergartners, and made Romney eat from his own “ocean of filth.”
Mitt Romney came out swinging last week against: “Barack Obama supports teaching sex education for kindergartners.” Here’s the YouTube video of the Fox News segment about that.
This incident demonstrates that Obama clearly has an effective “war room” in place and struck back quickly enough to slam the smear right back at Romney: On the same Fox News segment, Carl Cameron reported:
“In fact, Mr. Romney filled out a questionnaire for Planned Parenthood, the group that Mr. Obama was speaking to, in which he said back in 1991 and 1992 that he would support age appropriate sex education.”
It was a slam dunk “rapid response” and turned the story back on Romney. Jonathan Martin over at Politico.com reported that the Obama response caused Romney to backpedal.
Between the lines of that saga: Anybody that thinks Obama is “too nice” to face down the Republicans in the general election campaign ought to think again. It was a flawless, ruthless and surgical strike of the kind Democrats expect from any of aspiring nominee.
Now, on to observation number three…
3. The “open mic” flap may turn out to have been a paradigm moment in the ’08 campaign.
The open microphone incident didn’t receive much play here on DKos (probably because neither Edwards nor Clinton supporters want it to receive more attention) but it was vetted very well in a diary by Granny Doc.)
I sat jaw agape watching that exchange that Clinton and Edwards mistakenly thought was private. Not because I have a particularly strong opinion on whether all debates should feature all candidates (I like mano-a-mano mini-debates, but I somehow doubt the two candidates were proposing that to each other).
There were a series of major bloopers all wrapped into one video gone viral, and they tell us a lot about each of the top tier Democrats.
The first error was John Edwards’. He displayed a grand political naïveté by raising a private matter directly with Hillary Clinton in a public space. That just isn’t done in the big leagues. Not only were microphones present, but cameras were focused on them, and the very candidates he wanted to exclude were standing right there in possible earshot.
The second error was Clinton’s. She was caught off guard and said she agreed with him and that “our guys should talk.” That would have been the way to handle it – staff to staff – as opposed to candidate to candidate on a public stage. But even recognizing that, she incredibly kept on talking about it with him.
Then, if you watch the video more carefully this time, here’s what I found most interesting…
The third error comes at 1:04 in the video clock (made by both Edwards and Clinton), as Dennis Kucinich (one of the men that presumably would have been excluded) comes over to bid goodnight to his two rivals, and they don’t even notice him! He’s standing right there as Edwards talks on about his desire for “a more serious and a smaller group” (which presumably doesn’t include Kucinich). Kucinich quickly walks away without interrupting.
Then, they seem to end it, but here comes the fourth error, and it’s Clinton’s: She then pursues Edwards to continue the conversation there on stage! (Rewind the tape if you missed it.) As they’re still going at it, Obama comes up to shake hands. Obviously they’re not talking about excluding Obama from debates: He's too high in the polls, has too much money, no chance of that.
But did they bring Obama, the other front-runner, into the discussion about excluding the also-rans? No! Seeing this pushed me just a little closer toward my sense that Obama is the best positioned to take the nomination: Edwards falls silent and shakes Obama’s hand. “Thanks Barack,” says Clinton. They try to resume and Kucinich comes back. “Thanks Dennis.” And then, amazingly, even after two close scrapes with having their rivals overhear them, they keep at it: “Our guys should talk.”
For me, this was a defining moment and helped me to understand that neither Edwards nor Clinton felt “safe” bringing Obama into their exclusive discussion about exclusion.
Another obvious observation: Had either Clinton or Edwards been happy with their respective debate performances, had either felt she or he had won the debate, or even did very well, their thoughts would have not turned so quickly to “we need a different debate format.” It was an unintentional admission that both realized they had lost (another?) debate. And to whom did they think they lost?
The fact that Edwards went to Clinton, not to Obama, to propose smaller debates spoke volumes about who he thought won the debate (you don’t go to the debate winner to propose changing debate formats!). And Clinton voiced to Edwards that same sense of frustration with recent debates.
But here’s the real treasure to be gleaned from that unscripted moment in ’08 campaign history: It’s about the nature of “the clubhouse.”
That Edwards and Clinton did not want, not at all, to share their discussion with Obama, demonstrated that neither considers him to be “of” the club in the way that they consider each other to be.
This incident strongly suggests that Obama is “out here” (with the rest of us that were intended to be excluded from that exchange) and not “in there” with the proposed backroom deal. It serves as an unwitting recognition on his rivals’ parts that Obama really is cut from different cloth than the political insiders. They do not consider him to be one of them in the way they consider each other to be so.
And on the heels of that, Obama water-boarded Romney with the Republican’s own “ocean of filth,” showing that not being part of the club doesn’t translate into not ready for prime time.
Moments like those are golden in a campaign, because it shows how candidates behave when not reciting from a script. I posit that rank-and-file voters look especially to those moments when coming to their own decisions.