Clinton and Obama campaigners trade insults

Clinton and Obama campaigners trade insultsBy Edward Luce in Washington
Published: January 22 2007 18:27 Last updated: January 22 2007 18:27
The Democratic party’s presidential campaign got into full swing on Monday with campaign staff for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton already indulging in sniping contests over the relative merits of their candidates.
Campaign workers for Mrs Clinton, who on Monday signed the papers to set up a presidential exploratory committee – the first step before declaring a formal candidacy – made indirect attacks on the relative inexperience of Mr Obama, who entered the race a week ago.
Democratic consultants said the campaign, which already includes five other candidates, most notably John Edwards, the party’s 2004 vice-presidential candidate, was shaping up to be the most intense and long-running in the party’s history.
Polls show Mrs Clinton leading by a wide margin among registered Democrats. “Hillary’s Democratic primary support is climbing while others are stalled or falling,” wrote Mark Penn, Mrs Clinton’s chief pollster, in a memo. “She is not just strong, but the strongest in the field.”
Joe Trippi, who was campaign manager for Howard Dean, who almost took the 2004 Democratic nomination, said both Mr Obama and Mrs Clinton had been bounced into declaring their candidacies early by the strength of the other’s campaign.
George Soros, the New York-based billionaire, declared his support for Mr Obama the moment the first-term senator from Illinois signed the papers last week. Mr Soros, who has been one of the most generous supporters of Democratic campaigns in recent years, gave Mr Obama the maximum permitted individual donation.
“Both camps were watching the other sign up big-name donors in each other’s cities [Chicago and New York] and realised there was no time to lose,” said Mr Trippi, who is credited with running the most sophisticated internet campaign of its day.
On Monday night, Mrs Clinton kicked off what she said would be a running national “conversation” with voters via video weblink “about the direction our country is taking”. At the weekend Mrs Clinton will make her first visit to Iowa, the venue of an early caucus in the Democratic nomination early next year, where John Edwards is already the front-runner. Mr Obama is ahead of Mrs Clinton in New Hampshire, the site of the first Democratic primary.
All three leading candidates are planning to launch extensive online operations to build campaign “netroots”, which is considered important to their prospects. Mr Trippi, whose 2004 Howard Dean campaign attracted 650,000 internet supporters, says this time each will register millions.
“This is a completely different moment to 2004,” he said. “Then we didn’t have nearly as many blogs, we didn’t have YouTube, or MySpace. It is a safe bet that one of these candidates will be derailed by some obscure video recording on a cellphone that will be posted on the web.”
But the most intense competition between the candidates is likely to pivot around their Iraq war stances. Mrs Clinton, who last week returned from a visit to Iraq with a plan to launch a congressional resolution to “freeze” the number of US forces there at the January 1 level of 132,000, is probably the most vulnerable.
Having voted in favour of the war in 2002, Mrs Clinton has the most ground to make up among the party’s liberal base. Mr Edwards also voted in favour but has since recanted. Mr Obama always opposed the war.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
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