WASHINGTON, 4 December 2007 — As the countdown to the Iowa caucuses hits the one-month point, the already long and intense campaigns of presidential wanna-be’s has entered a new level of engagement as candidates on both sides of the ticket battle ferociously for undecided voters.
Recent polls suggest that nearly half of likely voters are still willing to change their minds, which has created an unsettling atmosphere for Republicans and Democrats alike.
New polls also show Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-New York, losing ground in the Iowa caucus race, against Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill. As a result, she mounted a new, more aggressive attack against Obama over the weekend, raising direct questions about his character, challenging his integrity and forecasting a sharp debate over those subjects in the days to come.
Several recent polls of Iowa caucus-goers showed Obama inching ahead of the New York senator, who has seen her campaign stall there, prompting a leading Democratic opinion journal to question whether Clinton was “too calculating” for her own good.
Obama advisers describe Clinton’s carpet-bombing technique — a term taken from the Vietnam War, used by US troops when they totally destroyed an area by massive bombing — as foolhardy.
They say Clinton’s attack is reminiscent of the approach perfected by former Bush White House adviser Karl Rove: Going after a front-runner on his strengths and challenging his sincerity.
According to Pew Research Poll released yesterday, Clinton’s standing in Iowa and New Hampshire is no better than Howard Dean’s at a comparable point in the 2004 presidential campaign.
Clinton, however, has stronger support in all three states than did the former Vermont governor. Indeed, there is considerably more strong support for each of the three leading Democratic candidates in Iowa — Clinton, Obama and John Edwards — than there was for Dean and the other leading Iowa contenders four years ago.
“It’s too soon to say whether Hillary’s campaign has stalled,” independent pollster John Zogby told reporters over the weekend. “Let’s just say it’s stalled in the sense that she hasn’t grown above 30 percent. For a candidate who was declared by her own staff to be the inevitable nominee, who has polled well into the 40th percentile in national polls, she needs to be asking the question, ‘Why am I only in the 20s in Iowa?’”
As a result of her recent poor ratings, some Democrats are beginning to question whether she hurt her candidacy when she voted to declare the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization and gave evasive answers to questions in a recent debate, including one about giving driver’s licenses to illegal aliens.
In a cover story in the December issue of the The American Prospect, executive editor Harold Meyerson wrote that Clinton “has played 2007 very well, but the year isn’t over yet.”
“Her vote on Iraq, and her pirouettes on the issue of driver’s licenses...could reinforce the perception that she’s too smart by half, too calculating, too triangulating, too — well, Clintonian,” Meyerson wrote.
“If Obama or Edwards can make this charge stick over the next two months, we may yet have a race, he wrote.”
But Obama is not only being attacked for his political platform, but also for his “Muslim links.”
Since declaring his candidacy for president in February, Obama, a member of a congregation of the United Church of Christ in Chicago, has had to address claims that he is a Muslim or that he had received schooling in Islam in Indonesia, where he lived from ages 6 to 10.
While his father was an atheist and his mother did not practice religion, Obama’s stepfather did occasionally attend prayers at a mosque there.
Despite his denials, rumors and emails continue to circulate on the Internet alleging that Obama is a Muslim, and that, if elected president he would take the oath of office using a Qur’an, rather than a Bible, as did Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minnesota, the only Muslim in Congress, when he was sworn in earlier this year.
While considerable attention during the campaign has focused on the anti-Mormon feelings aroused by former Republican Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, polls have also shown considerable hostility towards Muslims in politics.
