Trading Insults

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 25, 2008 11:02 AM

The Democratic campaign, it seems to me, is increasingly about itself.

We hear little about health care, immigration and Iraq (where the 4,000th American has died, generating a round of stories from news organizations that have been playing down the war). Instead, we hear about Samantha Power, Geraldine Ferraro, Jeremiah Wright, Tony McPeak; James Carville calling Bill Richardson a Judas and Obama backer Gordon Fischer, the former Iowa Democratic chairman, saying Bill Clinton was leaving "a stain on his legacy much worse, much deeper, than the one on Monica's blue dress."

Yuck.

The debate is not over where Clinton and Obama would lead the country. It's over the tactics they are using against each other, whether it's hopeless for Hillary and whether she should stay in the race.

This is what happens when you've got seven weeks between primaries and an increasingly bitter contest. The campaigns are having near-daily conference calls to attack each other, express outrage and demand apologies for what some surrogate on the other side said. The media, of course, are all too happy to lap this up. Journalists have been through 20 debates, and the minor issue differences, it seems, have been thoroughly hashed out.

The question now is whether all this sniping is hurting both candidates or whether it will all be forgotten by October. McCain and Romney were getting pretty personal a couple of months ago, and no one thinks about that now. But supporters of the losing Democrat are going to be extremely disappointed, and the party's worried that some of them might defect to McCain.

And just as the campaign is increasingly about itself, so too is the coverage, after that Politico piece I excerpted yesterday saying that journalists should stop the pretense and admit that Hillary is toast.

"The authors present it as a novel, even brave, conclusion. It's not," says Atlantic's Marc Ambinder. "Any regular visitor to Chuck Todd's commentary in First Read, any viewer of David Chalian's political commentary on ABC News now, anyone who has studied John King's futuristic charts and graphs on CNN, anyone who has listened to the major commentators -- Russert, Greenfield, Stephanopoulos, on the evening news -- anyone who has read a story by Adam Nagourney on the presidential race, anyone who has listened to or read Jonathan Alter, and I dare say, regular readers of this blog -- have known since before the March 3 primaries that the mathematics of the delegate selection process pose a near-prohibitively difficult challenge for Sen. Clinton. And many in the Clinton world know this. Indeed, the authors quote an anonymous senior Clinton adviser as saying there's only a 10 percent chance that she can win . . .

"Take the argument that this race is 'good business.' Really? While it is true that cable networks have seen revenue from higher ratings, newspapers have not seen any appreciable bump in their ad sales, and the television networks are not at all happy about the cost of the elongated nomination. Take a poll of the top fifty news division presidents or newspaper publishers and I'd bet that most would concede that the net financial effect of their political coverage has been negative.

"There are many more factors that the authors do not mention. Indeed, the authors' own publication, the Politico, is as responsible as any single publication for printing the type of horse race coverage that, in the eyes of the authors, are overstating the relative odds of the horses."

Talk about locking the barn after the horses are out.

Atrios says Politico is essentially right:

"While it would be absurd to claim that Clinton is treated well be the press -- she's treated horribly in general -- it's also the case that anyone else would be subjected to a louder and increasingly derisive drumbeat for her to get out of the race."

It's time for the party elders to take action, says American Prospect's Ezra Klein:

"It's a game of make-believe that's keeping the likely nominee locked in a useless and damaging deathmatch with Clinton, and keeping the party from turning its attention to John McCain. My understanding is that Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid don't want to labor ineffectually beneath another Republican president, but at some point, they're going to have to ask themselves if that's important enough to actually do something about."

But Big Tent Democrat objects to calling off the contest:

"It is frankly absurd to hear people, like NBC and the Left blogs, say Clinton should drop out because WE think she can not catch up. Who are we to decide what the voters will do? The voters get to decide. Not the pundits."

At the New Republic, Noam Scheiber wonders whether Denver could be a replay of the 1980 Democratic convention, when Jimmy Carter had to chase Ted Kennedy around the stage:

"It's true that the ideological gulf separating Kennedy and Carter doesn't divide Obama and Clinton. But, precisely because the substantive differences are so small, the temptation to court delegates along racial and gender lines would be even greater. And the sense of alienation among the losers would be overwhelming."

At Salon, Walter Shapiro wonders whether America needs a do-over: "After a week punctuated by Obama's right-stuff response to wrong-way Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Clinton's document dump of today-tea-was-served White House schedules, Democrats are being barraged with new information about the candidates long after most of them have made a binding decision on a nominee. It is akin to being given a subscription to Consumer Reports the day after you bought a new car."

CQ's Craig Crawford embraces an idea I hadn't heard before: "The early June superdelegate 'mini-convention' seems to be the most fair, reasonable and obtainable solution on the table. The idea is to have superdelegates meet right after the primaries conclude and settle this feud between Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton by casting their votes and putting someone over the top."

Will there be boozy parties? And would both candidates agree to such a thing?

Adam Nagourney has his own take on HRC's chances in a Times column:

"To listen to some of the discussion about the Democratic presidential contest these days, one would think that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton should have spent Easter weekend in Chappaqua, writing her withdrawal speech and preparing for her return to the Senate . . .

"But it's still not impossible. There remains at least one scenario where Mrs. Clinton could win. It is an increasingly unlikely one and one that could traumatize the Democratic Party. Still, it gives succor to her supporters, and presumably Mrs. Clinton herself, and is something to keep in mind watching the two of them head toward the endgame of their contest."

That is: win big in Pennsylvania, Indiana and Puerto Rico and convince the superdelegates she's more electable.

There's only one real way for Hillary to win, says Joe Klein, and that's ugly:

"Various media sorts have either called on her to pull out or pronounced her campaign over. I disagree. It's not our place to tell her when to pull the plug on her candidacy -- and there still are scenarios by which she can win the nomination. But those scenarios depend on schadenfreude, on the hope that Obama will prove to be massively unworthy . . . that the Wright revelations will prove the first of many, that white people will abandon him and young people in Pennsylvania and elsewhere will stay home, that Obama himself will lose his cool, say something stupid (A likely story, given his cool so far!).

"That is no way to win a nomination, or a general election. And it is striking to me that the Clinton campaign doesn't seem to be thinking about new, positive ways to make her case -- doesn't seem to be thinking about a larger theme, a vision for the future (which, in truth, is something her campaign has never had). Moreover, the attractive, fighting, emotionally accessible Clinton has gone into hibernation again -- since Texas and Ohio."

Now comes the political sniper fire for conjuring up that story.

You'll not be shocked to hear that Fred Barnes thinks all this is helping the GOP:

"John McCain is one lucky fellow. . . . Democrats are boosting McCain's chances of winning the presidency by prolonging the battle for the Democratic presidential nomination. 'They are eating their own,' says Dick Morris, the onetime adviser to the Clintons. The result, for the moment anyway, is that McCain is inching ahead in polls matching him against Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

"So long as Clinton stays in the race, the bitter divide among Democrats will widen -- to McCain's advantage. And since Clinton still has a chance of winning the nomination, she's bound to continue her campaign at least through the Pennsylvania primary on April 22 and the Indiana and North Carolina primaries on May 6 -- and probably until the verdict of Democratic super-delegates becomes clear sometime this summer.

"No matter who ultimately wins the nomination, the prospect for electing a Democratic president this fall will have declined."

By the way, Bill O'Reilly ripped The Washington Post last night for playing down the Hillary-Obama warfare. I happen to think the paper did give short shrift to Carville calling Richardson a betrayer and the New Mexico governor saying the Clintonites had a sense of "entitlement" about the presidency.

O'Reilly went on to say: "Perhaps Post Editor Leonard Downie is too busy allowing personal smear attacks in his publication. . . . Mr. Downie might rethink that policy as some Post employees have significant personal situations of their own."

Wha?

He also said The Post "is in the tank for the Democrats." Perhaps O'Reilly missed yesterday's the front-page story on Obama and Clinton both exaggerating their records, or Saturday's piece giving Hillary four Pinocchios for saying she once landed in Bosnia under sniper fire.

Curious about the "personal attacks," I found that Gene Weingarten's magazine piece about immersing himself in pundit land contained several comments ridiculing O'Reilly, including one unfortunately gratuitous personal swipe. I suspect that's a factor in the "Factor" attack.

As I mentioned, "Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign said she 'misspoke' last week when saying she had landed under sniper fire during a trip to Bosnia as first lady in March 1996. She later characterized the episode as a 'misstatement' and a 'minor blip.' "

At Slate, Melinda Henneberger and Dahlia Lithwick say Hillary should give an Obama-like speech on gender, and they supply some of the rhetoric:

"I am proud to be a woman and a mother and the first serious female contender for the presidency, but my gender is only a part of who I am, and it doesn't define or constrain me.

"I am part of a generation that faced and still faces all sorts of gender slights and slurs, and I honor the women who came before me for their commitment to achieving equal rights for women in the face of that. . . . But I would ask the women of this country to stop engaging in petty warfare over who has suffered more -- women or blacks, women or men -- as it is corrosive and fruitless . . .

"Married guys, don't fool around with hookers. Don't fool around with staffers. Don't fool around with interns or Supreme Court justices. It's insulting to us and to you and to them. Marriage has to mean something. Gov. Spitzer. Bill, darling. I can respect the heck out of your political achievements even as I berate you for demeaning marriage."

Okay, that one's not happening. And the speech won't be happening, "because as much as Hillary Clinton the wife and the woman and the mom no doubt hates it, Hillary Clinton the candidate has largely benefited from her husband's extracurricular activities. That's because -- and this is the tragic part -- America seems to like her best when she's being victimized -- by Bill or Rick Lazio or the media. In that sense, her husband is a useful prop who reminds us of the extent of her suffering.

"She won't give that speech because the whole narrative of her candidacy -- and more broadly, her life -- is as rooted in grievance as Obama's is in getting past grievance."

Is John McCain -- cue scary music -- hiding his secret Democratic flirtation? The NYT revives the issue:

"What Mr. McCain almost never mentions are two extraordinary moments in his political past that are at odds with the candidate of the present: His discussions in 2001 with Democrats about leaving the Republican Party, and his conversations in 2004 with Senator John Kerry about becoming Mr. Kerry's running mate on the Democratic presidential ticket.

"There are wildly divergent versions of both episodes, depending on whether Democrats or Mr. McCain and his advisers are telling the story. The Democrats, including Mr. Kerry, say that not only did Mr. McCain express interest but that it was his camp that initially reached out to them. Mr. McCain and his aides counter that in both cases the Democrats were the suitors and Mr. McCain the unwilling bride."

The Jeremiah Wright debate is still going pretty strong, particularly on the right, as reflected in this National Review piece by Victor Davis Hanson:

"The latest polls reflecting Obama's near-collapse should serve as a morality tale of John Edwards's two Americas -- the political obtuseness of the intellectual elite juxtaposed to the common sense of the working classes. For some bizarre reason, Obama aimed his speech at winning praise from National Public Radio, the New York Times, and Harvard, and solidifying an already 90-percent solid African-American base -- while apparently insulting the intelligence of everyone else.

"Indeed, the more op-eds and pundits praised the courage of Barack Obama, the more the polls showed that there was a growing distrust that the eloquent and inspirational candidate has used his great gifts, in the end, to excuse the inexcusable."

One problem: There is no near-collapse. The latest polls show Obama bouncing back to a small lead nationally over Hillary.

Detroit's mayor, who accused the media of a "lynch mob" mentality in reporting on the sexual affair he denied under oath, will have a hard time making that charge against the prosecutor who brought charges yesterday, since she's also black:

"Kwame Malik Kilpatrick, once heralded as the bright future of the city that reared him, instead became the first sitting Detroit mayor to face criminal charges -- eight felony counts, the fallout from a text message scandal," the Free Press reports.

"Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy, in a 23-minute speech Monday that was more stern civics lesson than announcement, likened the 37-year-old mayor's actions to an unrepentant child's. She then read a 12-count complaint charging perjury, conspiracy to obstruct justice, obstruction of justice and misconduct in office against Kilpatrick and Christine Beatty, his former chief of staff who announced her resignation in January."

Both the Detroit News and Free Press call on Kilpatrick to resign.

By the way, this is arguably worse than hiring hookers: Eliot Spitzer tied directly to a dirty-tricks investigation of the state Senate's GOP leader. Oh, and the new gov, David Paterson, the man of many affairs, now says he used cocaine a "couple of times" when he was a young man.