Bill Clinton Takes On the Media

The CNN commentator was swamped with calls last week after Fox's Major Garrett quoted sources as saying the Clinton camp planned to bring in Begala and James Carville as top advisers. Begala says that while he has donated to Clinton's campaign, he has not offered even informal advice or, as Garrett reported, joined a conference call.

"Whoever told you I am joining Hillary's campaign fed you some bum info," Begala wrote in an e-mail to Garrett. "It's just not true. Or as I say to my boys, N.H.D. Not. Happening. Dude." Garrett replied that he would "take it under advisement" and added Begala's denial to his reports.

"He has better sources about what I'm going to do than me?" asks Begala, who recounted the exchange on the Huffington Post.

Garrett says his sources insist the story is on target. "Just because someone denies what you're reporting doesn't mean you're in fact wrong," he says. "I have a record in this town, when I'm wrong, of admitting I'm wrong instantly. . . . I feel extremely good about my sources."

Says Begala: "I don't accuse him of making it up. I accuse him of not checking with me."

Carville, also a CNN analyst, says he "never had a conversation with anyone" about joining the campaign and was never called by Fox. He calls himself a "friend of the family" and says he did write a strategy memo for Clinton.

In Other News . . .

By the way, Hillary and Tim Russert really got into it when he played only the "fairy tale" part of her husband's attack on "Meet the Press," and she insisted--accurately, in my view--that Bill was talking about Obama's record on Iraq, not his entire candidacy. Some civil rights leaders have taken offense at that and Hillary appearing to diminish the accomplishments of Martin Luther King Jr.On the other hand, the Obama camp has put out a memo detailing how Hillary and her supporters have made what are depicted as racial references, including Andrew Cuomo's incredibly inelegant comment that Obama tries to "shuck and jive" his way through news conferences. (Read it here.)

Mitt Romney either has an eight-point lead, a smaller lead or is tied in tomorrow's Michigan primary, according to a spate of new polls. And we all know how accurate primary polls are.

But John McCain has soared nationally in a NYT poll: "Republican voters have sharply altered their views of their presidential candidates following the early contests in Iowa and New Hampshire, with Senator John McCain, widely written off just weeks ago, now viewed more favorably than any of his major competitors."

I ask again: widely written off by who? The New York Times and everyone else in the media!

The poll has McCain at 33, Mike Huckabee at 18 and Rudy Giuliani at 10, down from 22 last month.

"Thirty-three percent of Republican primary voters in the poll named Mr. McCain, of Arizona, as their choice, up from 7 percent a month ago." Mitt is in single digits.