All Blog Posts from Horserace

In the middle of Wednesday night's Republican debate, those who were watching closely were visited by the ghost of negative-campaign future as Fred Thompson unveiled what might be considered the first attack ad of the primary. Unlike Scrooge, however, there's not much we can do to avoid the desolate days ahead.

We've seen hints of what's to come -- phone calls raising questions about Mitt Romney's religious affiliation, whispers about Barack Obama and Islam that end up on the front page of a national newspaper and the latest attempt to resurrect Willie Horton. Allegations that Rudy Giuliani charged the city of New York for protection while he was carrying on an extra-marital affair will certainly be tame compared with what's about to come.

With all the candidates at the CNN/YouTube debate having been invited to submit a video to be aired during the event, Thompson's campaign took the opportunity to hammer Mitt Romney for having changed his public position on abortion and Mike Huckabee for once asking the Arkansas legislature for a tax increase. In today's vernacular, it’s on.

This weekend, the Republican Majority for Choice (a pro-abortion rights group) will air an ad calling Romney a flip-flopped on abortion. The ad, airing in Iowa and New Hampshire, points out that Romney has had several positions on the issue and urges voters to ask the now-prof-life candidate to "flip-flop just one more time – and stay there." It's not a dark attack ad and it’s an issue Romney has dealt with since the day he entered the race. What it does is help usher in the nasty season.

In Iowa, the Des Moines Register reports on an e-mail making the rounds that appears to be coming straight from Romney's campaign alleging that a supporter of Giuliani is a "pedophile priest." The Romney campaign denies any connection. And this is Iowa, what will South Carolina, a state notorious for bare-knuckled tactics, look like once the focus shifts there?

It's always a risk for campaigns to directly take the negative route. The backlash can be as damaging as the charges unleashed and any funny business, such as connections to shady operators or tactics, can be devastating. This time, the calculations are more complicated because the campaign's most crucial period is taking place during the Holiday season. Will voters respond to negative messages they get in mailings alongside cheerful cards from friends and family or in ads that accompany otherwise uplifting television shows?

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If it's Wednesday (or any other day ending in "y" this cycle), it must be debate day. This time, it's the GOP candidates who are gathering in St. Petersburg, Florida to answer questions ostensibly submitted by – you. User-generated content and online video is transforming politics in 2008, or at least altering the prism through which this campaign is being seen.

This will be the second debate being sponsored by CNN and YouTube in which voters from all walks of life (providing they have a computer, camera and the know-how) are invited to submit questions to the video-sharing site in the hopes of getting their concerns directly in front of the presidential candidates. For this debate, some 5,000 video questions have been submitted (up from around 3,000 submitted for the Democratic version) and they range from the serious to the silly. The "snowman" is back in the list of submissions, along with one from "Frankenstein" asking Mitt Romney whether Mormon undergarments would help save him from those pesky torch-wielding villagers.

That's one reason some candidates have been wary about participating. Romney earlier said he wasn't interested in participating in the debate, saying the presidency of the United States is too serious a concern for such gimmicks. But he'll be on stage tonight. Campaigns are wary of not openly embracing the newest, hippest media trends of the day. There were politicians, after all, who were slow to recognize the importance of television ads for similar reasons.

Out of nearly 5,000 questions, just a handful (perhaps 30 to 40) will be selected and the vast majority of those to choose from concern the same issues these candidates have discussed throughout the campaign, like the war in Iraq, immigration, health care, energy, climate change and education. The questions can be powerful in this format because they often personalize the issue being addressed, such as the cancer patient who asked Democrats about health care coverage. But, with a couple of exceptions, the substance remains consistent.

Campaign 2008 has already broken the mold of every campaign that has come before. It started nearly two years before the presidential election, has morphed into a nominating system which will see nearly half of the nation's states vote on a single day and has spurred an explosion in innovation. But, just as the compressed primary calendar hasn't changed the importance of meeting and cultivating voters in Iowa and New Hampshire, all the bells and whistles on the Web won't replace the need for candidates to have coherent positions on the issues most voters care about.

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Even the biggest, strongest and most powerful, best positioned campaign wants to avoid a two-front presidential primary battle but that's what Mitt Romney increasingly is finding himself fighting these days. The former Massachusetts governor has led in nearly every Iowa and New Hampshire poll in recent months and, despite still lagging in national surveys, appeared well-positioned to capitalize on the traditional bounce winners of those early states receive.

Out of the four bigger GOP candidates, Romney has run the most traditional campaign. He's laid the groundwork in Iowa by methodically organizing supporters, spreading resources and spending lots of time in the small hamlets of the state. He's spent less time in New Hampshire, where he's already well-known, but hasn’t ignored the state. And he's run more ads in those early states than all the others put together by far.

Now Romney's best-laid plans are being challenged in both states. In Iowa, Mike Huckabee's rather stunning surge has him within striking distance of the front-runner there. Iowa has never been a comfortable fit for either Rudy Giuliani or John McCain. Giuliani's differences with social conservatives and McCain's differences with GOP activists on illegal immigration have resulted in them paying less attention to the state. Conservatives not sold on Romney appear to have considered Fred Thompson as an alternative and found him wanting, turning instead toward Huckabee.

New Hampshire has long been more competitive. It's a state McCain won in 2000 and where he's increasingly turned back to for this campaign. Ron Paul appears to be in a position to play some type of spoiler role in the independent-minded state. Giuliani and Thompson up until now have appeared stronger in states following New Hampshire, particularly South Carolina and Florida. Those later-state strategies could fall apart should Romney cruise to wins in Iowa and New Hampshire. But with Romney suddenly bogged down a bit in Iowa against Huckabee, Giuliani is stepping up his attacks in New Hampshire, throwing an already fluid race into a potential wide-open free-for-all.

Unlike the Democratic campaign, which is focused so heavily on Iowa, the GOP battles span the primary map. Watch closely over the next five weeks to where these campaigns spend time and where they choose to make their stands. Most importantly, watch how the Romney camp deals with this new two-front war.

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The dinner-table feasting may be in the rear-view mirror but the main course of the presidential primary season is just starting to be served. Some of the dynamics roiling the campaign waters this week:

Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney are becoming increasingly pointed – and personal – in New Hampshire. Giuliani, who has downplayed the need to perform well in the early states, has spent more and more time in the Granite State in the hopes of derailing Romney there and the result is an escalating war of words between the two men. They've gone back-and-forth on immigration, fiscal policy and health care – and now it's getting more heated. Giuliani is taking aim at Romney's appointment of a Massachusetts state judge who released a convicted murderer who has now been accused of murdering again.

"This whole appointment of a judge goes to a much bigger point -- that Governor Romney had a very poor record in dealing with murder and violent crime as governor," Giuliani said. More pointedly, according to CBS News' Ryan Corsaro, Giuliani told reporters, “I think Governor Romney is trying to distract from what is a mistake that he clearly made, but the bigger mistake he made was that crime went up – violent crime and murder – went up while he was governor. And I think is something that talks about not just an isolated mistake, it talks about a series of mistakes.”

Romney has called for the resignation of the judge and shot back with a reference to Giuliani associate Bernard Kerik, who was once recommended by the former mayor to lead the Department of Homeland Security and is now under indictment. "Of all the people who might attack someone on the basis of an appointment, I thought he would be the last to do so," Romney said.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are accusing one another of playing politics with their health care plans. The topic has been a primary point of discussion since it sparked an exchange in the last Democratic debate. "Senator Obama and I have been having a debate about health care for a couple of days and it's a very important debate," Clinton told the AP. "The difference is my health care plan covers every American and Senator Obama's plan will not."

More pointedly, Clinton said Obama's health care place was more about politics than policy. ""He leaves 15 million people uncovered. It's a plan crafted for politics, not for people," she said. "Hillary's idea is that we should force everyone to buy insurance," Obama retorted. "But this is yet another issue where she is not being straight with the American people because she refuses to tell us how much she would fine people if they couldn't afford insurance." And Obama added, "Unless she can answer those questions this is yet another calculation that's more about getting through an election than actually solving the health care problems."

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While you'll find plenty of Republicans who'll argue there is much more to their party's problems than the unpopular war in Iraq, there's little doubt that Democrats would be feeling so optimistic about their electoral chances had events of the past four years unfolded differently. So it must be heartening for the GOP faithful to see a recent spate of positive news coming out of Iraq, right? Well, maybe not so much.

Conservative blogs and talk radio programs are buzzing about stories like the one appearing in the New York Times yesterday which are providing at least anecdotal evidence that the security situation is improving in Iraq. It may be a measure of vindication for the administration's "surge" policy but for the Republican presidential field, even good news isn't likely to be enough to aid their prospects.

While candidates like Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney remain largely supportive of the war, they've certainly not made it an emphasis of the campaign, preferring instead to focus on terrorism and what they've come to describe as the fight against radical Islamic Jihadism. A little good news out if Iraq isn't about to change that. For one thing, candidates who might feel the urge to embrace signs of progress risk backlash should the situation deteriorate once again. For another, public attitudes probably won't change much on the war unless President Bush suddenly begins appearing before throngs of cheering Iraqi's in the middle of Baghdad or troops begin arriving home in mass numbers.

But good news could benefit GOP candidates by pushing the issue aside. "The main thing [an improving security situation] does is lower Iraq on the agenda," Republican pollster Whit Ayers tells CBSNews.com's Brian Montopoli. "That helps Republicans, because even an improving Iraq remains a sore spot for the country. So the best thing that can happen for Republicans is that it gets removed from the front pages of our nation's newspapers and leads in the television broadcasts and we argue about something else."

Not all Republicans agree. GOP strategist Steve Schmidt, a one-time adviser to John McCain's campaign, tells Montopoli that the issue is too central to be ignored. "This will be a huge part of the discussion in a presidential campaign," he says. "There are pundits that will say this election will be about the economy, or about health care, but at the end of the day, by virtue of the number of Americans fighting in Iraq, it will be a huge issue."

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Hillary Clinton yesterday emphasized the importance of experience while stumping in Iowa even as new evidence emerged showing voters in that state are more interested in change. "There is one job we can't afford on-the-job training for – our next president," Clinton said in an economic speech. "That could be the costliest job training in history. Every day spent learning the ropes is another day of rising costs, mounting deficits and growing anxiety for our families. And they cannot afford to keep waiting."

It's the crux of Clinton's campaign message. Whether the issue is the economy, health care or the war in Iraq, Clinton argues that she understands the process, knows how to pull the levers of power and has learned from mistakes of the past. While John Edwards tries to turn that experience against her by arguing she is too beholden to the established system, Barack Obama largely dismisses the importance of experience altogether.

Obama consistently questions the value of Clinton's eight years spent as First Lady, often pointing out that he has spent more time in elective office that the New York Senator. Responding to Clinton's pitch yesterday, Obama retorted, "My understanding is she wasn't Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration. I don't know exactly what experience she's claiming. Rather than just assert experience, if she has specific differences with me in regard to economic policy then let's have that debate."

In an Iowa contest which has been a virtual dead-heat between the top three Democrats for months, there are signs that Obama may be winning that argument – or at least benefitting from the desire for change. In the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll, Obama not only holds a slim four-point lead, he also appears to be on the right side of the state's Democrats on the experience v. change argument. Fifty-five percent of those polled said their number one priority was a "new direction and new ideas" while just 33 percent said they are seeking "strength and experience."

Obama is fond of saying that experience doesn't count for much when the wrong judgments are made and uses his initial opposition to the war in Iraq to underscore the point. Iowa remains ground zero for the Democratic race and Clinton recently shifted a whole lot of resources to the state. She may need more than staff and money, however, to hold back Obama if Iowa Democrats come down on the side of change over experience.

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This unprecedented off-year campaign is quickly winding down and 2008 is going to start with a bang. As tensions increase heading into the crucial Iowa caucuses, so do the risks of long-term damage for the nominees of both parties.

In just the past week we’ve begun to see the kinds of incidents that appear to guarantee that we're in for a wild ride over the next seven weeks. But while campaigns jostle for position and advantage in the primary contests, they’re also opening themselves and their parties to dangers in the general election.

We got a taste of things to come starting last week, when voters in Iowa and New Hampshire reported receiving phone calls which pushed questions about Mitt Romney's Mormon faith. It was not an unexpected development. Romney's religion has been a major topic of discussion since he entered the race last winter. But it did signal that tactics have begun moving in a new direction in the unpredictable GOP contest.

Over the weekend, the Democratic race was dominated by an item by conservative columnist Bob Novak, who reported that "agents" of Hillary Clinton's campaign are "spreading the word" that Clinton's camp has "scandalous information" about Barack Obama but will not disseminate it. Obama took the rare step of personally responding and insisting that there is no such information. Clinton's campaign said they knew nothing about Novak's item and publicly wondered whether Obama was demonstrating some thin skin.

Much of this is posturing, of course, and meant to build on themes and narratives already established for most of the candidates. Despite the fact that most voters say they reject attacks on Romney's religion, there could well be some impact among some, especially evangelicals, who view his faith negatively. Obama sought to capitalize on some long-held perceptions about Clinton's bare-knuckled, even underhanded, tactics. Clinton's campaign, in turn sought to portray Obama as too inexperienced and green to take on the GOP next year.

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New York Senator Hillary Clinton went a long way toward regaining her political footing in last night's Democratic presidential debate in Las Vegas. In an exchange that was once again focused on the front-runner from the opening gun, Clinton for the first time engaged her opponents and defused much of the criticism they’ve aimed at her in recent weeks.

Declaring that she had on her “asbestos” pantsuit, Clinton also demonstrated that she could pack a little heat of her own. She dealt with the first question of the evening, about the recent shots taken at her candidacy by saying, “I'm perfectly comfortable leaving these assessments up to the American people to make their judgments among us.”

But when Barack Obama followed by asserting that she has not been delivering “straight answers to tough questions,” Clinton shot back. Obama “talks a lot about stepping up and taking responsibility and taking strong positions,” she said. “But when it came time to step up and decide whether or not he would support universal health care coverage, he chose not to do that.” In the back-and-forth that followed the candidates argued about their health care plans, a rarity for Clinton, who has up until now sought to stay far above such frays.

Next up was John Edwards, who hit Clinton on a variety of fronts, accusing her of trying to be on all sides of important issues and of defending a “rigged” and “corrupt” system. “I don't mind taking hits on my record on issues,” Clinton retorted, “but when somebody starts throwing mud, at least we can hope that it's both accurate and right out of the Republican playbook.”

In those opening minutes, Clinton seemed to disarm her two toughest Democratic opponents – or at least knock them off balance. While both continued to try and chip away at Clinton for the rest of the debate, neither had as much success as they did in the last debate, where the front-runner stumbled several times. Twice when Edwards appeared to be inching toward criticizing Clinton, he was met with a smattering of boos from the audience.

And Barack Obama turned what should have been an easy question into a tortured discourse on immigration policy. It was Clinton, in the last debate, who appeared to both support and oppose a proposal to provide driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants. Given that the issue has been a major topic of discussion for the past ten days, it would seem likely that the candidates would be prepared. But when asked whether he would support or oppose the idea, Obama said he would support it then launched into a lengthy discussion of comprehensive immigration until CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, the debate’s moderator, said, “this is the kind of question that is sort of available for a yes or no answer.” When Clinton was asked, she simply said, “no.” Editor's Note: This post has been updated

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What happens in Vegas at tonight's Democratic debate certainly won’t stay in Vegas. In fact, despite Nevada's early position in the nomination process (the state will hold caucuses on January 19th), the candidates tonight will be speaking as much to voters in Iowa. And after the last debate saw Hillary Clinton stumble a bit under attacks by her primary opponents, the tension has been ratcheted up.

Tonight's dynamic is likely to be similar – with John Edwards and Barack Obama continuing to seek to define Clinton as overly cautious and political while seeking to claim the mantle of the anti-Clinton candidate. One week before the Thanksgiving, it's a pivotal time in the campaign. While most of the nation presumably pauses for the long holiday weekend, the clock will continue to tick toward the January 3rd Iowa caucuses. It's not exactly a now-or-never moment, but it is a chance for Edwards and Obama to continue to chip away at Clinton's aura of invincibility -- or for her to recover from last month's stumbles.

Obama and Edwards may well feel emboldened to continue their aggressive postures tonight. Since that last debate, Clinton has faced a series of detrimental stories, not the least of which is her campaign's admission that they planted at least one question during a town hall meeting in Iowa. Her poll numbers have slipped nationally and in New Hampshire, though the race in Iowa remains a statistical dead-heat between the three. The good news for her is that neither Obama nor Edwards have been able to break away. It's more a matter of Clinton coming back to the pack.

Clinton so far has played keep-away, refusing to engage in kind to the jabs thrown at her. By not engaging directly, Clinton has tried to promote an image of being above the fray, in control and focused on her message of depth and experience. That approach has worked to a point but the last debate demonstrated the perils of the strategy, especially when she is the primary focus for nearly two solid hours. That's not likely to change tonight -- will her strategy? Stay tuned.

Now, Was That So Hard? Two weeks after saying she both supported and opposed New York Governor Eliot Spitzer's proposal to provide driver's licenses to illegal immigrants, Clinton yesterday announced that she is now firmly opposed to the idea. In the last Democratic presidential debate, Clinton said she understood the reasoning behind the proposal then balked at actually supporting the idea. Clinton tried to clean that flub afterwards, saying she supported Spitzer, if not the proposal.

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Just when you thought it was safe to handicap the GOP presidential race, Mike Huckabee crashes the party. The former Arkansas governor has taken his underfunded and underdog campaign to new heights in Iowa, according to the latest CBS News/New York Times poll. Huckabee has surged to a all-time high 21 percent in the poll, trailing front-runner Mitt Romney in Iowa by just 6 points. In a Des Moines Register Iowa poll in October, Huckabee had just 12 percent.

A poll, of course, is simply a snapshot in time and we'll need to see more evidence of a Huckabee surge before buying into it totally. But it's not surprising to see him gaining. Iowa is a state tailor made for Huckabee's candidacy and message. Rudy Giuliani, who has sort of slipped in and out of the state, seeming to commit to really competing one day then vanishing for periods of time. Fred Thompson's late and lackluster entrance into the campaign hasn't won over the legions of support some once believed was there for his taking. John McCain, who started out behind the eight-ball in the state because of his support for the Senate's version of immigration reform appears to be aiming more at New Hampshire.

Still, Huckabee has struggled to capitalize on his surprising second-place showing in the Iowa Republican straw poll in August, bringing in a rather anemic $1 million during the third quarter. And, he has seen the support of social conservative leaders go to candidates much less simpatico with the movement's core beliefs. When Thompson received the backing of the National Right to Life Committee earlier in the week, it appeared to be a direct shot at Huckabee's viability.

But the attention he has paid to the state coupled with the conservative message he's delivered is paying dividends. Of those supporting Huckabee, 39 percent say it's because he shares their values or is a conservative. Just 20 percent of Romney supporters said the same about their choice.

Adding Huckabee to the mix in Iowa puts the race in even more flux than before. The CBS poll shows Romney with a solid lead in New Hampshire and should he manage to win both those early contests, he should gain a large boost heading into South Carolina and beyond. But McCain is ticking up in New Hampshire, a state he won in 2000 (he's tied for second with Giuliani in the CBS poll). And Romney fares less well in places like South Carolina, where his Mormon faith could be an issue – particularly in the rough-and-tough primary politics there – where Thompson appears strongest. And Giuliani's campaign has said they are counting on big showings in Florida and the February 5th states to rack up the delegates needed to win the nomination.

It all adds up to a fuzzy picture getting even fuzzier.

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