Clinton Bests Obama in Money, Polls

With third quarter fundraising numbers released -- by at least some of the campaigns -- New York Senator Hillary Clinton has opened up an advantage in fundraising over Senator Barack Obama, though the Illinois Democrat continues to perform well, even if his poll numbers seem to have stalled everywhere except Iowa. Despite the summer doldrums -- the New York Times this morning said "well-heeled donors get out of their offices and off the fund-raising circuit to go on vacations and to their summer homes" -- Obama raised more than $20 million, bringing his 2007 take to nearly $80 million. He has raised money from 352,000 donors.

New York Senator Hillary Clinton, who in the first two quarters trailed Obama by a small margin, raised $27 million, according to a blog post today by Patrick Healy in the New York Times. Healy reports that Clinton has raised about $60 million for use in the primaries (money has to be identified either as primary or general election money, and Clinton has raised a higher percentage of her total for the general than Obama). Adding an additional $10 million from her 2006 Senate campaign fund, Clinton has amassed about $70 million for the primary season, versus $75 million for Obama, Healy reported.

The other Dems trailed the frontrunners significantly -- former North Carolina Senator John Edwards (who now say he will take public matching funds, restricting his primary spending flexibility state-by-state) raising $7 million and New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, about $5.2 million.

The Republicans, as they have all year, trailed the Democrats by a significant spread. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney raised about $10 million, former Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson, more than $8 million (but remember -- this is his premier quarter raising money, so he did not have the launch splash that others enjoyed), and Arizona Senator John McCain, just over $5 million.

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani has not disclosed his numbers, saying only he would "do as well as the other Republicans -- maybe we will do better than some"... whatever the heck that means.

Clinton, however, is strengthening her polling numbers, both nationwide and in New Hampshire, though Obama appears to have a slight lead right now in Iowa.



First the numbers in Iowa. In an October 1 story, the Boston Globe reported:

The survey -- conducted for Newsweek magazine and released in the current issue of the magazine that has Romney on the cover -- has Romney with the support of 24 percent of likely GOP caucus-goers, compared to 16 percent for Fred Thompson, 13 percent for Rudy Giuliani, 12 percent for Mike Huckabee, and 9 percent for John McCain.

Obama has 28 percent among likely Democratic caucus-goers, ahead of 24 percent for Hillary Clinton, 22 percent for John
Edwards, and 10 percent for Bill Richardson.

Besides the horserace numbers, the poll includes some other interesting findings:

• Two-thirds of both Democrats and Republicans said they think America is ready to elect an African-American president.
• 72 percent of Republicans and 63 percent of Democrats said they themselves would be willing to vote for a Mormon, but only 45 percent of Republicans and 33 percent of Democrats said they think America is ready to elect a Mormon as president.
• 78 percent of likely Republican caucus-goers had a favorable opinion of Romney, 77 percent said that he is able to get things done, 49 percent said he can bring needed change, and only 25 percent said that he flip-flops his positions too much on important issues.
• 77 percent of likely Democratic caucus-goers said they had a favorable opinion of Clinton, 79 percent said it would be a good thing if former President Clinton were back in the White House, and a majority said that her position on the Iraq war does not affect their support.
  

The poll of 1,215 registered voters was conducted on Sept. 26 and 27 by Princeton Survey Research Associates International. The margin of error for likely Democratic voters is plus or minus 7 percentage points and for likely Republican voters is plus or minus 9 percentage points.

And in New Hampshire, a press release from Newsmax/ Zogby reports that though Clinton leads overall by a comfortable margin, Obama has the edge among voters under 30. Clinton, however, leads in the critical category of independents who are allowed by state law to vote in either the Democratic or Republican primary:

New York Sen. Hillary Clinton has extended her lead in the race for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in New Hampshire, capturing 38% support as the contest enters the crucial fall phase, a new NewsMax/Zogby International telephone poll shows.

Illinois Sen. Barack Obama has slipped slightly but retains a strong grasp on second place with 23% support, while former senator John Edwards of North Carolina faded to 12%, the survey shows. Ten percent said they remain unsure about who to support in the race.

The telephone survey included 505 voters likely to participate in the New Hampshire Democratic primary election. It was conducted Sept. 26–28, 2007, and carries a margin of error of +/– 4.5 percentage points.

Clinton jumped a full 10% since Zogby polling this spring, solidifying an edge she has built nationally heading into the fall campaign. She enjoys a dominant 44% to 22% lead over Obama among women, and holds a healthy 31% to 22% lead over him among men. Edwards is mired in third place among women with 11% support, and is fourth behind New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson among men. Richardson wins support from 14% among men, while Edwards gets backing from just 13%.

Democrats in New Hampshire – 2007	Sept. 28	May 16	Apr. 3	Feb. 7	Jan. 17
Clinton	38%	28%	29%	27%	19%
Obama	23%	26%	23%	23%	23%
Edwards	12%	15%	23%	13%	19%
Richardson	8%	10%	2%	3%	1%
Kucinich	3%	4%	1%	1%	1%
Biden	2%	1%	2%	2%	3%
Dodd	2%	<1%	<1%	1%	<1%
Gravel	<1%	<1%	<1%	<1%	<1%
Someone else	4%	-	-	-	-
Not sure	10%	15%	17%	23%	22%

Obama leads among likely Democratic primary voters under age 30 with 38%, compared to 30% for Clinton. The two are closely matched among those age 30–49, but Clinton holds a strong advantage among those over 50. Among those age 50–64, she holds a 45% to 18% edge over Obama, with Edwards at 17%, and she wins among those age 65 and older, 45% to 14% for Obama. Edwards wins just 10% among those age 65 and older, typically one of the strongest voting demographics in primary elections.

Clinton has solidified her leads across the ideological spectrum in the Democratic Party, leading Obama by a 33% to 21% edge among progressives, 42% to 23% among liberals, and 36% to 25% among moderates. Edwards finishes a distant third in all of those categories.

Among independent voters who said they plan to participate in the Democratic primary election in New Hampshire, Clinton also leads, winning 33% support, compared to 25% for Obama and 13% for Edwards. Richardson wins 8% support among independents.

Among Democrats, Clinton’s lead is larger – she wins support from 41%, compared to 21% for Obama and 11% for Edwards.

As news begins to break on how the candidates did at fund–raising for the third quarter of the year, the latest NewsMax/Zogby survey shows that Hillary Clinton’s fund–raising connection to indicted contribution bundler Norman Hsu has had little effect on her overall standing. Hsu raised more than $850,000 for the Clinton campaign and is now under investigation for allegedly violating federal campaign finance laws, but just 11% said that information makes them less likely to support Ms. Clinton. Further, 11% said that association with Hsu makes them more likely to support her. The vast majority – 78% – said it makes no difference to them in their support of a candidate for President.

Moderates and younger voters appeared to be slightly more concerned about the matter than others, but only marginally so.

For a complete methodological statement on this survey, visit:
http://www.zogby.com/methodology/readmeth.dbm?ID=1215

Click the link below to view the full news release:
http://www.zogby.com/news/ReadNews.dbm?ID=1364

The Times' Trifecta on Iraq

This past Sunday's New York Times op ed pages offered a brilliant triad of analyses of where the US Iraqi policy is in the wake of congressional testimony by General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker last week.

First, Frank Rich in a tough-minded column, "Will the Democrats Betray Us?," got to the heart of the matter:

SIR, I don't know, actually": The fact that America's surrogate commander in chief, David Petraeus, could not say whether the war in Iraq is making America safer was all you needed to take away from last week's festivities in Washington. Everything else was a verbal quagmire, as administration spin and senatorial preening fought to a numbing standoff.... General Petraeus couldn't say we are safer because he knows we are not.

Rich then turned to President George W. Bush's repackaging of the limited 2008 troop withdrawals:

The only troops coming home alive or with their limbs intact in President Bush's troop "reduction" are those who were scheduled to be withdrawn by April anyway. Otherwise the president would have had to extend combat tours yet again, mobilize more reserves or bring back the draft.

Finally, Rich, understanding that there is NOTHING more that can be expected from the Bush administration, challenges the 2008 contenders to offer more and to offer specifics:

New bin Laden tapes and the latest 9/11 memorial rites notwithstanding, we're back in a 9/10 mind-set. Bin Laden, said Frances Townsend, the top White House homeland security official, "is virtually impotent." Karen Hughes, the Bush crony in charge of America's P.R. in the jihadists' world, recently held a press conference anointing Cal Ripken Jr. our international "special sports envoy." We are once more sleepwalking through history, fiddling while the Qaeda not in Iraq prepares to burn.... Mr. Bush, confident that he got away with repackaging the same bankrupt policies with a nonsensical new slogan ("Return on Success") Thursday night, is counting on the public's continued apathy as he kicks the can down the road and bides his time until Jan. 20, 2009; he, after all, has nothing more to lose. The job for real leaders is to wake up America to the urgent reality.

Paul Krugman in "A Surge, and Then a Stab," focuses on Iraq's economic bloodline to diagnosis the surge's failure:

To understand what’s really happening in Iraq, follow the oil money, which already knows that the surge has failed... Without an agreed system for sharing oil revenues, there is no Iraq, just a collection of armed gangs fighting for control of resources. Well, the legislation Mr. Bush promised never materialized, and on Wednesday attempts to arrive at a compromise oil law collapsed. What’s particularly revealing is the cause of the breakdown. Last month the provincial government in Kurdistan, defying the central government, passed its own oil law; last week a Kurdish Web site announced that the provincial government had signed a production-sharing deal with the Hunt Oil Company of Dallas, and that seems to have been the last straw.... Ray L. Hunt, the chief executive and president of Hunt Oil, is a close political ally of Mr. Bush. More than that, Mr. Hunt is a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, a key oversight body.

Having failed, Krugman writes, Bush has only one option -- to write that failure into the next president's history, not his own:

Here’s how I see it: At this point, Mr. Bush is looking forward to replaying the political aftermath of Vietnam, in which the right wing eventually achieved a rewriting of history that would have made George Orwell proud, convincing millions of Americans that our soldiers had victory in their grasp but were stabbed in the back by the peaceniks back home.

And finally, Thomas L. Friedman, the pundit who of these three has been most credulous about what Bush has attempted in Iraq, in "Somebody Else's Mess," offers the most damning assessment, echoing Rich's view, but going further:

George W. Bush delivered his farewell address on Thursday evening — handing the baton, and probably the next election, to the Democrats. Why do I say that? Because in his speech to the nation the president basically said that on the most important, indeed only, legacy issue left in his presidency, Iraq, there would be no change in policy — that a substantial number of U.S. troops would remain in Iraq “beyond my presidency.” Therefore, it will be up to his successor to end the war he started.

Friedman is clearly prepared to go long on Democratic stock, but also issues a warning to them:

While Mr. Bush’s tacit resignation last week greatly increases the odds of a Democratic victory in 2008, there are several wild cards that could change things: a miraculous turnaround in Iraq (unlikely, but you can always hope), a terrorist attack in America, a coup in Pakistan that puts loose nukes in the hands of Islamist radicals, or a recession induced by the meltdown in the U.S. mortgage market, which forces a stark choice between bailing out Baghdad or Chicago.

And Friedman too argues that the Democrats will have to have a proactive stance on national security, not one based solely on being the un-Bush:

Be careful: despite the mess Mr. Bush has made in the world, or maybe because of it, Americans will not hand the keys to a Democrat who does not convey a “gut” credibility on national security.

That argument is much the same as a warning Rich issues regarding the obsessively cautious signals coming from the Democratic presidential camps not only in their criticisms of Bush, but also in their unwillingness to take on those allies on the left -- specifically MoveOn.org -- who are muddying up the debate and throwing fuel on the fire of political divisiveness (though probably gathering a fair amount of cash in the process) rather than contributing to a national dialogue of clarity and purpose:

Americans are looking for leadership, somewhere, anywhere. At least one of the Democratic presidential contenders might have shown the guts to soundly slap the "General Betray-Us" headline on the ad placed by MoveOn.org in The Times, if only to deflate a counterproductive distraction. This left-wing brand of juvenile name-calling is as witless as the "Defeatocrats" and "cut and run" McCarthyism from the right; it at once undermined the serious charges against the data in the Petraeus progress report (including those charges in the same MoveOn ad) and allowed the war's cheerleaders to hyperventilate about a sideshow. "General Betray-Us" gave Republicans a furlough to avoid ownership of an Iraq policy that now has us supporting both sides of the Shiite-vs.-Sunni blood bath while simultaneously shutting America's doors on the millions of Iraqi refugees the blood bath has so far created.

Read these three pieces.

Frank Rich on the Return of the Whigs

In his September 9 New York Times op ed, Frank Rich, looking at this week's reports to Congress from General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, warns that what he calls a "24/7 Pentagon information ' war room'" will do work to do for the surge what the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG, did for the new product launch of a war on Saddam five years ago this month.

White House "facts" about the surge's triumph are turning up unsubstantiated in newspapers and on TV. Instead of being bombarded with dire cherry-picked intelligence about W.M.D., this time we're being serenaded with feel-good cherry-picked statistics offering hope. Once again the fix is in. Mr. Bush's pretense that he has been waiting for the Petraeus-Crocker report before setting his policy is as bogus as his U.N. charade before the war. And once again a narrowly Democratic Senate lacks the votes to stop him.

And Rich points fingers at those responsible for the credulity with which the new Bush PR initiative is being received:

But this has not impeded them from posing as quasi-journalistic independent observers elsewhere ever since, whether on CNN, CBS, Fox or in these pages, identifying themselves as experts rather than Pentagon junketeers.... Katie Couric seemed to be drinking the same Kool-Aid (or eating the same lobster tortellini) as Mr. O'Hanlon. As "a snapshot of what's going right," she cited Falluja, a bombed-out city with 80 percent unemployment, and she repeatedly spoke of American victories against "Al Qaeda." Channeling the president's bait-and-switch, she never differentiated between that local group he calls "Al Qaeda in Iraq" and the Qaeda that attacked America on 9/11. Al Qaeda in Iraq, which didn't even exist on 9/11, may represent as little as 2 to 5 percent of the Sunni insurgency, according to a new investigation in The Washington Monthly by Andrew Tilghman, a former Iraq correspondent for Stars and Stripes.

"As the Iraqis Stand Down, We'll Stand Up," by Frank Rich, September 9.