The View from Atop the Polls
Dan Balz of the Washington Post reports on a tiff at Harvard’s Institute of Politics:
A brewing argument over Iraq between the presidential campaigns of Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama broke into public view here Monday night when Clinton’s chief strategist challenged Obama’s credentials as a consistent opponent of the war.
Mark Penn and Obama strategist David Axelrod engaged in a pointed and occasionally heated exchange during a public forum at Harvard University over the issue that has become the central point of dispute between the two leading candidates for the 2008 Democratic nomination.
…
The Clinton campaign later supplied several Obama quotations from 2004 to buttress Penn’s attack. One came from the New York Times, in which Obama declined to criticize the Democratic Party’s presidential and vice presidential nominees, Sen. John F. Kerry and then-Sen. John Edwards, for supporting the 2002 war resolution. “But I’m not privy to Senate intelligence reports,” Obama said, according to the Times. “What would I have done? I don’t know. What I know is that from my vantage point the case was not made.”
Meanwhile, a spot bashing Clinton and supporting Obama yet not authorized by his campaign is getting wide play on YouTube and beyond.
Only 10 months until an actual vote in this election is cast.
[Updates:] Kos smacks the usually revered political analyst Stuart Rothenberg for thinking the anti-Clinton video is irrelevant - another example of what is fundamentally a generational divide in both the practice and coverage of American politics. Senator Clinton’s own views on the video are covered on the New York Times political blog. Meanwhile, Matthew Yglesias posts on what he perceives is the irony of Mark Penn arguing in December of 2005 for a moderate path on Iraq and now arguing that Clinton is no more moderate than Obama. For better or for worse, pollster recommendations live forever on the web.
