CLINTON WON THE BATTLE, OBAMA IS WINNING THE WAR. Improbably, the Clinton-Obama fight is still going strong and, also improbably, Obama now seems to have the upper hand. How do I know? In the first 24 hours after the debate it was Obama who was arguing Clinton was distorting his position, now it's Clinton's surrogates who are arguing Obama is distorting her statement. As Marc Ambinder pointed out, It's never a good thing in politics to say "what I meant to say was." That's the position Obama was in shortly after the debate:
[Clinton is] somehow maintaining [that] my statement could be construed as not having asked what the meeting was about. I didn't say these guys were going to come over for a cup of coffee some afternoon. From what I heard the point was well, I wouldn't do that because it might allow leaders like Hugo Chavez to score propaganda points. I think that is absolutely wrong.
Yet, in a deeply impressive bit of street-fighting the Obama campaign has managed to turn what originally was a Clinton attack on him into a counterattack on Clinton. On Thursday and Friday both campaigns were going at it. Obama called Clinton "Bush-Cheney lite" and Cliton's campaign called Obama "Naive." There were a bunch of "both sides think they can win this" articles and blog posts written. Today however, I'm ready to call this for Obama. Polling shows more people agree with him than Clinton (though this is probably a pretty hard question to poll fairly since it depends so much on wording) and Clinton's campaign is now on the defensive. Clinton supporter and first-tier surrogate Tom Vilsack is now saying that Clinton actually agrees with Obama:
"Rather than just simply acknowledging the mistake that was made during the course of the debate, the Senator has attempted to distort Senator Clinton's record in an effort to mask this confusing statement of his," said Vilsack. "It's not the Iowa way." Vilsack also scolded Obama for comparing Clinton's foreign policy philosophy to that of the Bush administration; "These comments are so wrong, one could say that they are certainly audacious, but honestly they are not particularly hopeful," said Vilsack.
You know you're losing when you start complaining that the other side is being unfair in not "admitting the mistake." The Obama campaign is packed with incredibly sharp people (as of course is Clinton's) and any candidate who thinks Obama's rhetoric means he won't be willing to give as good as he gets is going to be quite rudely surprised.
As the ever-prescient E. J. Dionne noted last Friday, this debate helps Obama in two ways. First, he gets to go one-on-one with the frontrunner which is a good for him and bad for her. Second, it allows him to make the debate aobut her vote for the Iraq war. Clinton's strength, experience, has gone head to head against Obama's, his better record of judgement and his commitment to change, and, based on the evidence above, I think Dionne's analysis is right and Obama will come out this fight strengthened.
--Sam Boyd