Panic Mode?

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 4, 2007 10:29 AM

First, a couple of news notes:

The Huckaboom continues. How did the man from Hope go from contender in Iowa to national contender so quickly? A USA Today poll has it Rudy 25, Huckabee 16, Thompson and McCain 15, Romney 12. Remember, Huck was nowhere in the national polls a couple of months ago.

And is the World War III that President Bush talked about facing with Iran being postponed? A National Intelligence Estimate--on which the president was kept informed--says Tehran stopped working on a bomb program in 2003. That would be about the time the administration was selling us on Saddam's non-existent WMD, no?

All right, let's turn to Hillary Clinton (the media's national front-runner on the Democratic side) and Mitt Romney (the media's Iowa/New Hampshire front-runner among the Republicans). As we get down to the final month and the race inevitably tightens, they are, naturally enough, responding, leading to this considered reaction from the media:

OMG they must be panicking!!!!!

Romney's going to give a speech about his religion, which he's been pondering for months. Hillary is punching back at Barack Obama, who has stepped up his rhetoric against her. Seems like the normal campaign back-and-forth to me. But then, I'm not freezing my butt off in Des Moines and having to come up with a new story every day.

Here's the latest "incendiary" rhetoric from Hillary: "So you decide which makes more sense: Entrust our country to someone who is ready on Day One--or to put America in the hands of someone with little national or international experience, who started running for president the day he arrived in the U.S. Senate."

Wow--scorching!

Joe Klein is in the Hillary's-overreacting camp:

"Clinton's poll-driven attack on Obama seems a bit too sweaty and desperate for her current situation, which is still a dead heat in the totally unpredictable January 3 caucus, although an Obamaward ripple can be discerned. And this attack seems downright idiotic.

"All right, it's true Clinton is in a tussle--I've talked to lots of voters in the past few days out here in Iowa who seem to be moving toward Obama--but these sorts of harsh, obvious attacks won't do her any good . . . Which is something John Edwards has learned over the past month: His attacks on Clinton did him absolutely no good and may have hurt. He told us today, in Fort Dodge (I think it was), that he would spend the last month of the Iowa campaign making the positive case for his candidacy. Proving once again that Iowa--as opposed to some other states I can name--is a very nice place. Mean don't cut it around here.

"At the very least, the current caucus-fog should put the end to another journalistic cliche I hate: Inevitability. I've been watching politicians for a long time now and I've never seen an inevitable candidate (who wasn't an uncontested incumbent). It's been wildly silly--and I might add, a persistent Republican talking point--to say that 'Hillary is a lock' for the nomination, just as it was wildly silly four years ago to say that Howard Dean had it in the bag. Next thing you know, people will be saying that she's toast--especially if she loses Iowa--which will be equally dopey."

A similar reaction from American Prospect's Ezra Klein:

"I thought the Clinton camp's attacks on Obama for trying to mobilize Iowa's student population were a bit unseemly. But, frankly, they weren't nearly as odd as the repeated e-mails trumpeting the fact that, in kindergarten, Obama wrote an essay entitled 'Why I Want to be President,' this disproving Obama's claim that he's 'not running to fulfill some long held plans.'

"This actually strikes me as the Clinton campaign in full scramble. Till now, I've been immensely impressed with the discipline of their attacks. Everything -- everything -- was narrative based, dedicated to furthering impressions of Obama as inexperienced. Over the last week or two, however, the campaign has moved into a full-court press, attacking Obama on anything and everything, in the hopes that something will stick. The focus on the inexperienced narrative has dissipated, giving way to attacks on policy (Social Security and health care), ambition, etc. Some of these assaults are fair, some aren't, but the scattershot fusillade has certainly grown more desperate and less controlled, reflecting, I'd bet, the sentiments of the campaign. Additionally, you have the campaign e-mailing out Iowa polls that show them ahead, which they've not done till now. They're worried."

PowerLine's Paul Mirengoff says HRC isn't playing to her strengths:

"As a potential president, Clinton has several advantages over Obama, but character and honesty are not among them. I won't rehearse the various problems that nearly caused her to be indicted during the 1990s. That's old news that Democrats never cared too much about, although I'm confident that many Dems are happy that Obama doesn't labor under this burden.

"But consider Clinton's claim (again per the Post) that Obama lacks the courage to stand up for his convictions. For Democrats, of course, the key conviction is always opposition to the war in Iraq. Obama opposed it from the start. Clinton voted in favor of it. In this context, how does Clinton expect her attack on Obama's steadfastness to resonate in her favor? This approach seems more likely to push Clinton into third place than to carry her to victory in Iowa."

Hillary is heading down a dangerous road, argues Captain Ed:

"Obama may have a skeleton or two in the closet with his Chicago connections to Tony Rezko, but the Clintons have a figurative graveyard in theirs. Obama can start with the Travel Office firings and the trumped-up criminal case that attempted to cover it up, to the 900 raw FBI files the White House illegally held, pass up Monica Lewinsky and go straight to the records that Hillary and Bill refuse to release from his administration. If Hillary wants to make character an issue, then she legitimizes all of that debate, and plenty more besides.

"Obama may or may not decide to take advantage of the bounty Hillary just provided him, at least not personally, but the Republicans just heard the bugle call for this particular horse race. Not that they needed any prompting, but Hillary has now endorsed their vast right-wing conspira -- er, their opposition research efforts. If she wins the nomination, this particular quote will be offered over and over again to show her endorsement for character as a legitimate election issue."

Robert Reich, who was Bill's labor secretary, is off the bandwagon: "I just don't get it. If there's anyone in the race whose history shows unique courage and character, it's Barack Obama. HRC's campaign, by contrast, is singularly lacking in conviction about anything."

Obama, for his part, has launched a Hillary Attacks Web site.

As for Romney's planned Mormon speech, the Atlantic's Marc Ambinder sees potential risks and benefits. First, the pros:

"1. It's a ubiquitous issue, there's a lot of misinformation about the religion, and there perhaps are some voters who would be comforted by having Romney explain precisely how his faith would inform his decision-making.

"2. Perhaps Romney is personally aggrieved by the public and private attacks on his religion and he feels compelled to defend it.

"3. The Romney campaign is collecting information about an under-the-radar campaign to directly attack Romney on his religion and wants to pre-empt it."

And some cons:

"1. A large tranche of voters in Iowa will blanche at Romney's attempt to make them feel guilty about their objections to Mormonism.

"2. Christian conservatives do not like to be lectured to; depending on what Romney says, they might feel as if he lecturing to them.

"3. Romney' speech guarantees a week of in-depth, public debate about the specific practices of Mormonism.

"4. Romney is now taking ownership of every single practice, of every single historical quirk of his religion.

"5. The press will spend the days leading up to the speech speculating that Romney is giving it because he is panicked about losing Iowa."

Number five-- bingo!

Whatever Mitt says isn't likely to satisfy Americablog's John Aravosis:

"Romney needs to decide if he wants to be the religious right candidate, the Mormon candidate, or the secular candidate - he can't be all three. He can't be a Mormon, claim he's a Christian, suck up to the far-right Baptist wing of the Republican party that wants to force their fringe religious beliefs down the rest of America's throat, and then tell us that his religion is irrelevant. He's running as the religious candidate while running from his own religion."

Is this becoming less of an Iraq election? "Fifty-two percent of Americans say the economy and health care are most important to them in choosing a president, compared with 34% who cite terrorism and social and moral issues, according to the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll," today's WSJ reported. "That is the reverse of the percentages recorded just before the 2004 election." (Although the war was cited by more than named the economy or health care separately.)

How does one run for vice president? If you're Bill Bennett, by signaling your availability to someone like Kathryn Jean Lopez:

"Trained in philosophy, Bennett would prove to be a good communicator and effective spokesman for an administration . . .

"I'm far from the first person to suggest the former education secretary for vice president. In fact, Bob Dole asked him to be his running mate in 1996. Bennett declined the opportunity. Much like I am doing now, in 2000, conservative columnist Bob Novak insisted Bush ask Bennett in a cover piece for National Review. But as much as he loves public service, Bennett was never that into the idea . . .

"When I recently asked him if he'd consider it this time: 'I have been asked to consider this seriously twice before and said 'no' each time -- the timing wasn't right then. But sure, I wouldn't mind being asked again, and, sure, I'd think about it.' "

I promised a more complete report on National Review's war blogger, which comes on the same day as the latest about the New Republic's war blogger:

After nearly five months of mounting criticism, the New Republic yesterday disavowed reports about petty wartime cruelty in Iraq, saying the magazine had lost faith in the Army private who wrote them.

"We cannot be confident that the events in his pieces occurred in exactly the manner that he described them," Editor Franklin Foer wrote of the dispatches by Scott Thomas Beauchamp. "Without that essential confidence, we cannot stand by these stories."

Foer said in an interview that he kept waiting for Army investigative documents -- some promised by Beauchamp -- that never arrived. "I hope our investigation and honest admissions of failure will reassure our readers that we're committed to the highest standards," he said.

The magazine's admission came as National Review Online acknowledged that two postings it carried from Lebanon by W. Thomas Smith Jr., a former Marine, were "misleading." One involved a report that 4,000 to 5,000 Hezbollah gunmen had "deployed to the Christian areas of Beirut in an unsettling 'show of force.' " No other journalist in Lebanon has reported seeing such a deployment.

In the New Republic case, Foer acknowledged a key "mistake" in checking on whether Beauchamp lied or exaggerated in writing that U.S. soldiers had made fun of a disfigured woman, run over dogs for sport and played with an Iraqi child's skeletal remains. Foer said Beauchamp's wife, Elspeth Reeve, then a researcher at the magazine, was assigned "a large role" in checking the story. While Reeve acted in good faith, he said, "there was a clear conflict of interest."

Foer said he recognizes that some of the corroboration was coming from "Beauchamp's buddies" and that the private "sounded defensive and evasive" in trying to explain why he initially placed the allegedly disfigured woman in Iraq rather than Kuwait.

"We never should have put Beauchamp in this situation," Foer wrote. "He was a young soldier in a war zone, an untried writer without journalistic training."

Reeve said last night that "the retraction doesn't make much sense" and that even if Beauchamp had provided the magazine with his statement to Army investigators, it was "no magic bullet." Many of Beauchamp's Army friends told her they supported her husband, Reeve said. "I'm not saying that's absolute proof of the stories, not at all. But I think it shows there's a lot more reporting that could be done on the story."

At National Review Online, Smith, who directs counterterrorism research for the group Family Security Matters and is executive editor of World Defense Review, writes a blog called the Tank. Questions about his reporting were first raised by the Huffington Post's Thomas Edsall, a former Washington Post reporter.

Edsall quoted four journalists with Middle East experience as challenging Smith's Sept. 29 account that thousands of Hezbollah gunmen had surfaced in Beirut. One, Michael Prothero, called the account "insane." Another, Chris Allbritton, said Smith is a "fabulist."

They also challenged Smith's Sept. 25 description of a "sprawling Hezbollah tent city" near the Lebanese parliament, occupied by "some 200-plus heavily armed Hezbollah militiamen."

Kathryn Jean Lopez, National Review's online editor, said yesterday: "We're at the point where we're reviewing other things he's written for us and will make a decision from there. And tied to this all, we're putting more safeguards in place to prevent this from happening with writers." Lopez had told the Huffington Post that some of Smith's reports were incomplete and misleading.

On his National Review blog, Smith backed away from his report on the thousands of Hezbollah gunmen: "I should have caveated the reporting by saying that I only witnessed a fraction of what happened (from a moving car), with broader details of what I saw ultimately told to me by what I considered then -- and still consider to be -- reliable sources within the Cedar Revolution movement, as well as insiders within the Lebanese national security apparatus. . . . Since then, I have not been able to independently verify that 'thousands' of armed Hezbollah fighters deployed to the Christian areas of Beirut in late September, but my sources continue to insist that it happened."

As for the Hezbollah "tent city," Smith said he "saw at least two AK-47s there with my own eyes."

"Did I physically see and count 200 men carrying weapons? No. If I mistakenly conveyed that impression to my readers, I apologize."

In the polarized world of the blogosphere, conservative Web sites, led by the Weekly Standard, hammered at the flawed reports in the New Republic, while the liberal Huffington Post blew the whistle on National Review. But while liberal bloggers pounced on Smith's work yesterday, they were joined by conservative Michelle Malkin, who accused the writer of "bogus, shoddy reporting" and "phenomenal errors."

Speaking of ethics, check out this report from Greenwire:

"The phony U.S. Climate Action Partnership Web site is down, and the jig is up.

"An organization purporting to be USCAP issued a fake press release this morning, saying BP, Dow, Environmental Defense and 30 other USCAP members had agreed to cut their greenhouse gas emissions 90 percent by 2050. Further, Matt Leonard, a 'spokesman for the consortium' using the name 'Matt Leopard,' was quoted in the press release saying 'world governments assembled in Bali this week should begin rapid transition to zero-emission energy sources and commit to a 90 percent reduction from 1990 levels by 2050.'

"By 12:30 p.m. EST, the phony Web site, www.climateactionpartnership.org, had been taken down. But not before the Dallas Morning News, Thompson Financial, as well as several newswires and blogs had posted stories.

"In a telephone interview this afternoon, Leonard confirmed the Web site was the work of a grassroots environmental group calling itself Rising Tide."

Lying as a PR tool? Interesting concept.