Top Democrats Reticent on Primary Choices

By Chris Cillizza And Shailagh Murray
Former nominees and Former nominees
Sunday, December 30, 2007

The silence is deafening. So many prominent politicians, particularly Democrats, have refrained from endorsing a presidential candidate. Are they drowning in a sea of good options, or terrified of making the wrong call?

Either way, the absence of these major voices is one of the more remarkable features of the 2008 campaign and may be contributing to the closely contested battles on both sides in Iowa, with the caucuses less than a week away.

Among the missing . . .

Former nominees

Al Gore: What time zone is the Nobel Prize-winning environmental crusader in today? After endorsing Howard Dean in the 2004 race and watching his candidacy go down in flames, he may not be eager to get involved again.

John Kerry: No one seems to have a clue which way the 2004 Democratic caucus winner may be leaning, although former running-mate John Edwards is definitely not on the list.

Local heroes

Sen. Tom Harkin: His wife, Ruth, a political player in her own right, is a staunch Clinton supporter, but Iowa's senior Democrat is lying low.

Sen. Chuck Grassley: The GOP icon declared long ago that the Republican field was simply too muddled to pick sides, and that he probably would sit out this cycle. Allies say that's not likely to change.

Liberal icons

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy: With so many Senate colleagues running, it's like picking which child you love best.

Sen. Russ Feingold: A hero to the antiwar left, but has his own presidential ambitions to protect.

The truly torn

Rep. Rahm Emanuel: He worked for President Clinton, but Barack Obama is a close friend and a fellow Chicagoan. What's an Illinois Democrat to do? Flee to Brazil until mid-January and pray it's over when you return. Seriously.

Absent Negative Ads

The final week before any high-profile election is usually filled with charges and countercharges by the leading candidates -- generally delivered via hundreds of television commercials.

But, with the Iowa caucuses just days away, it looks as if not a single truly "negative" ad (or even the more mild "comparative" commercial) will run before Hawkeye State Democrats gather on Thursday.

The closest thing The Fix could find? An ad paid for by the campaign of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) that hit the airwaves late last week that attacks "outside groups" for "spending millions to stop change." The ad is an oblique reference to a direct mail piece sponsored by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, which is running an independent expenditure campaign on behalf of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.).

Thin gruel, to say the least.

Clinton is up with a comparative ad in Iowa, but the comparison is focused on President Bush, not one of her Democratic rivals. "What if we had a different president this year," asks the narrator in the commercial. The spots goes on to note that Clinton repeatedly sought to act on "America's housing crisis" while "George Bush and Wall Street did nothing."

Former senator John Edwards (D-N.C.) went negative a long time ago on corporate America, but not against his main opponents for the Democratic nod.

Whatever happened to good old knock-down, drag-out politics?

Erik Smith, a senior aide in the 2004 presidential campaign of former congressman Dick Gephardt (Mo.) and now a Democratic consultant, argued that the law of unintended consequences makes it too risky for any candidate to go negative

"In a tight multi-candidate primary, the overriding concern is the ricochet," Smith said. "Each candidate needs to make their strongest possible closing argument, and there is no appetite for the potential unintended consequences of a negative ad this late in a competitive race."

Candidates worried about a ricochet need only look back to 2004. In that race, Gephardt and former Vermont governor Howard Dean unloaded on each other for weeks on television, only to watch it backfire as Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) and Edwards shot the gap into first and second place in the caucuses.

For each of the three front-runners, there is much risk in going negative.

Clinton has spent much of the campaign fighting against the idea she is too political, too willing to engage in the politics of personal destruction. A negative ad campaign would reinforce that idea for voters. For Obama, his appeal is centered on his call for a new kind of politics -- one that does not include the typically grainy black-and-white images of comparative commercials.

Edwards rode to a surprisingly strong second-place finish in 2004 on the strength of his sunny optimism, and his numbers have moved up of late as he has transitioned back into that message for the final days of this campaign.

Given all that, it seems more likely than not that the Democrats will continue to play nice with one another. There's always the Republicans. . . .

96 hours: Yup, we're counting down to the Iowa caucuses in hours, not days. It's that close.

6 days: As soon as the caucus winners are declared, attention will shift to New Hampshire. Specifically the back-to-back debates (Republicans first, then Democrats) sponsored by ABC, WMUR and Facebook at St. Anselm College.