Tuesday night's debate was everything that politicos had thought it would be.  What Barack Obama may have lacked in aggressiveness towards Clinton, John Edwards and Tim Russert made up for it.  Clinton's performance was, without question, her weakest of the campaign.  The media seemed to find mistakes both in her cautious hedging on various issues and with her expression and attitude.  I'll agree that her response on Social Security lacked detail and that she didn't really make clear whether or not she supported Governor Eliot Spitzer's immigration plan.  On the issues of Iraq and Iran, however, I found no problem with her positions.  John Edwards succeeded in making it sound as though he and Clinton have different plans for leaving some troops behind in Iraq: they don't.  Both Clinton and Edwards favor leaving some residual forces behind in Iraq to train Iraqi troops and to combat elements of al Qaeda that exist there.  From Marc Ambinder:

Here's what Edwards said on September 7 – "As president, I will redeploy troops into Quick Reaction Forces outside of Iraq, to perform targeted missions against Al Qaeda cells and to prevent a genocide or regional spillover of a civil war."

From the Edwards campaign website:

After withdrawal, we should retain sufficient forces in Quick Reaction Forces located outside Iraq, in friendly countries like Kuwait, to prevent an Al Qaeda safe haven, a genocide, or regional spillover of a civil war. . . . Edwards believes we should intensify U.S. efforts to train the Iraqi security forces.

But Clinton didn't point this out.  In keeping with a strategy she has employed the entire campaign, she didn't really discuss her fellow competitors for the nomination.  In every debate, when John Edwards or Barack Obama attacks Clinton for one position or another, she responds to those lines of attack by giving a broad-based description of her position on the issue and then attempts to build consensus by comparing the small differences in the Democrats' proposals with the gaping chasm that separates them from the GOP.  It's a strategy that is often employed by front runners and one that had worked up until Tuesday night.

However, I find the strategy of ignoring the other candidates and their proposals especially frustrating given the fact that on a range of issues (especially health care and personal savings accounts) I think that Clinton has the best plan.  There is very little disagreement between most of the Democratic candidates on the major issues.  Clinton either doesn't know this or, more likely, doesn't want to deign to consider the other candidates as equals by recognizing their policy prescriptions.  Either way, I think she'd be well served by being a little more aggressive towards her other competitors when they ruthlessly attack her.  It shouldn't fall to Chris Dodd to point out that John Edwards is receiving tons of contributions from trial lawyers -- certainly a special interest -- while maintaining a holier than thou attitude on his campaign's funding.  If Senator Clinton wants to say that she "won't get swift-boated" by the GOP in the general election, why doesn't she prove it in the primary.

The Democratic presidential debate in Philadelphia isn't until tomorrow night, but already analysts think the main theme of the evening's discussion will be front runner Hillary Clinton.  Yesterday, I noted Senator Obama's recent efforts to try to define differences between himself and Senator Clinton on policy issues such as Social Security and Iran.  ABC News' influential tip sheet The Note made the "New Barack Obama" its top story of the morning.  Tomorrow's debate at Drexel University may serve as a large platform for both Obama and Edwards to attack Clinton on both policy differences and electability.

Donna Brazille, who managed Al Gore's 2000 campaign, is urging Edwards to argue that Senator Clinton's campaign is doomed to failure:

But having supporters do it [criticize Clinton's electability] is not the same as doing it yourself, said Donna Brazile, who managed Al Gore's 2000 campaign.

"I want to see if John Edwards will say to Hillary Clinton in front of everyone: 'You're not electable, and you know it, and you're going to hurt people down the ballot,' " said Brazile, who hasn't endorsed anyone. "It's time to stop whispering. It's getting to be midnight."

I have discussed the charge that Clinton is unelectable before, and I think polls taken since then have strengthened my case that she can be elected.  In fact, I think both Clinton and Obama would start the general election with a leg up on whoever the GOP nominates.  John Edwards is the major Democratic candidate that I think has the worst chance of winning the presidency if nominated.

The view that Edwards would be the most electable candidate is often based largely on the fact that he was once a senator from a Southern state.  This is incredibly simplistic to say the least.  Edwards tends to poll better than most Democrats in the deep South, but his numbers in usual Democratic strongholds in the Northeast and West aren't very strong.  If running against, say, Rudy Giuliani, Edwards could very well have to fight tooth and nail to hold on to New York and New Jersey, while struggling significantly in blue collar swing states such as Pennsylvania and Michigan. 

Then there is the whole problem of how John Edwards' campaign would survive the news cycles and spin sessions that are so important (unfortunately) in presidential elections.  The media doesn't like Edwards at all.  That much seems indisputable.  From the $400 haircut story, to his stately mansion, to the constant criticism of him as a pretty boy and a light-weight which hurt him in the 2004 campaign, the media will literally jump at the chance to call him a hypocrite for every expensive jet he flies in or watch that he wears.  It's ridiculously unfair, of course, that anyone who champions the cause of poverty has to be subjected to the gotcha stories that cable news channels love so much, but it is also likely that that is what will happen, if the campaign so far has been any indication.

I'll be watching closely tomorrow night.

Listen here.

In this show:

• Hillary Clinton vs. Barack Obama on Social Security.
• Idea of the week: Charles Rangel's plan to fix the Alternative Minimum Tax.
• Book Review: The Argument.

This show's stack of stuff:

• Obama Goes After Clinton on Social Security (Washington Post).
• Charlie Rangel's Plan to Reform Corporate Taxes (Brookings Institution)
• Rangel's AMT Plan (San Francisco Chronicle)
• Kevin Drum's review of The Argument (Washington Monthly)

Show information:

• The number to call-in is (646) 716-7342
• The BlogTalkRadio web address for the show is here.

Tonight at 11 PM, I'll be hosting a live episode of the Dem Talking Points podcast on Blog Talk Radio.  The page is here.  I'll be talking about Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama's dust up over Social Security, Chuck Rangel's plan to fix the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT), and Matt Bai's book The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics.  You can also call in and talk about whatever you like.  The number is (646) 716 7342.

Well, the NFL's regular season debut outside of North America ends in victory for my New York Giants, 13-10 over the Miami Dolphins.  It rained the whole game in London and the field wasn't made for football to begin with, making traction hard to come by.  Giants quarterback Eli Manning threw for only 59 yards, though he did run for a touchdown.  The game was just plain ugly, but the crowd of around 90,000 at Wembley Stadium was pretty enthusiastic anyway.  When the Manning dropped to a knee to run the clock out with less than a minute to go in the game (standard operating procedure in football) the crowd booed loudly, which was pretty funny.  All things considered, the atmosphere was pretty good though the surface and weather caused things to be pretty sloppy.  The Giants improved to 6-2 with their sixth straight win.

On an unrelated note, I think I may have a podcast on BlogTalkRadio this evening, at a still to be determined time.  Check back here for more details and head over to our page at BlogTalkRadio.  You can stream the show live online and call in at (646) 716-7342.

Trailing Hillary Clinton markedly in both national and state polls, Barack Obama is finally playing offense against the New York senator.  On the stump in Des Moines, Iowa, Obama lit into Clinton for what he sees as her evasive position on Social Security, saying "[y]ou should hedge, dodge and spin, but at all costs, don't answer."  His remarks are aimed at identifying what his campaign sees a weakness in Senator Clinton's armor: her consistency and transparency on big issues.  Obama's chief strategist David Axelrod is making said yesterday that "[t]here's a whole range of issues she has been less than forthcoming, and she's made a judgment that this is a good political strategy."

The media is all over this dust up between the campaigns, the first since the debate over diplomacy that occurred during and after the CNN/YouTube debate.  So far, the front runners in the race for the Democratic nomination in 2008 have waged pretty civil campaigns, leaving the media with little to report on other than Senator Clinton's "inevitability."  The media knows that the public is more interested in the Democratic nomination than the Republican one, but so far the Dems race has been polite and somewhat dull.  So even though this story has mostly occurred over the weekend, the media is playing it up for all it's worth.

Mark Halperin, former lead author of ABC's daily tip sheet The Note and beltway media icon, features Alexrod on the front of his Time website.

And what about Matt Drudge, the man Mark Halperin says rules beltway journalists' world.

As loathe as I am to agree with the Beltway media over Democratic infighting, I do think that it is healthy for Clinton and Obama to spar a little more.  Clinton has played the role of the front runner, as Axelrod noted, very effectively so far, but in order for both candidates to define their positions on Social Security and other issues, as well as to hone their rapid response teams, it is probably good to have them mix it up a little bit.  Senator Clinton's health care plan is, in my opinion, very detailed and strong, as his her plan for universal 401(k)s as a means to bolster retirement security.  With that said, I wish she would be a little more detailed with regard to how to address Social Security's solvency.  This is what primaries are for, so here's hoping this turns into a battle of ideas and not into just another politics-driven news cycle.

Good piece (link only good for a week for non-subscribers) by political analyst Ron Brownstein on the National Journal's web site.  He talks about the need for the GOP to adapt to a new era in politics or take big hits at the ballot box.  Quite simply, he thinks they need to focus more on new ideas than on ideological uniformity.  Kevin Drum observes (correctly) that following every election cycle the losing party seems to face a crisis of identity:

Every two years the losing party has this exact same conversation: (a) move to the center to appeal more to swing voters, or (b) move left (right) in order to stay true to the party's liberal (conservative) heritage? My sense is that (b) is almost always the choice after the first loss or two, after which (a) finally wins out.

This year, though, we're in a historically odd position. The Republican Party is still in stage (b), but to a smaller extent, the Democrats are back there too. The Democratic Party spent so long in stage (a) during the 90s, moving aggressively to the center after years in the wilderness, and the GOP moved so far to the right under Gingrich and Bush, that Democrats have the luxury of being able to move modestly to the left and yet still be moving relatively closer to the center than the Republican Party. On a scale of 1 to 10, it's like the GOP is moving right from 8 to 9 while the Democratic party is moving left from 4 to 3.5. The lunacy of the conservative base is providing a huge amount of cover for liberals to make some modest progress this year.

As far as the Republicans go, it is clear that they have reflexively leaned back on their outdated philosophies for government instead of doing the far more difficult task of soul-searching.  The fact that all the Republican candidates for president are still spouting supply-side rhetoric, ignoring the threat of global warming, and advocating the stay-the-course approach to foreign policy, when these policies are precisely the reason President Bush is so unpopular, is a clear sign that the party is intellectually bankrupt.

I have just finished reading Matt Bai's book The Argument, which basically chronicles the Democratic party and the progressive movement from 2004 through 2006 (review coming shortly).  Bai's conclusion is essentially that the movement doesn't have much of an argument for how it wants America governed in the age of a global economy, stateless terror, YouTube, etc.  Instead, he contends, it falls back on defending old New Deal policies that are under constant assault from conservatives but that are outdated and no match for the challenges of the 21st century.  I've got to say that, for the most part, he's right.  But if that's true for progressives/Democrats, boy is it true for conservatives/Republicans.  More on that later.

In 2008, for the first time since 1928, no incumbent president or vice president will be seeking the executive office.  This gives both politicians and the American people a terrific opportunity to look towards the future and to propose bold ideas, if there are any to offer.  In short, to paraphrase from Bai, it will be the first 21st century election in the 21st century.  I think politicians, activists, and commentators on both sides owe it to future generations to take Brownstein's words to heart.  Democrats want to win the election, but they also should be interested in winning the future.

In this show:

• Republican foreign policy failures and foibles
• Idea of the week: Chris Dodd's plan for mandatory community service
• Book Review: The Thumpin'
• We take a call from Asher in Wisconsin, a 13-year-old political junkie who blogs at leftwingkid.com.

This show's stack of stuff (archived forever unlike the right-hand column, which is constantly changing):

• Russert: ISG Commissioners Say Giuliani's Excuse For Leaving Is Untrue (Think Progress)
• Dodd Urges Mandatory Community Service (Boston Globe)
• What Giuliani Gets Away With (The Hill)
• The Hillary Dilemma (Larry J. Sabato)
• Rebutting Larry Sabato's "Hillary Dilemma" (Dem Talking Points)

Show Information:

• The number to call-in is (646) 716-7342
• The BlogTalkRadio web address for the show is blogtalkradio.com/demtalkingpoints
• You can subscribe via iTunes by clicking here.
• You can download the show as file by clicking here

Tonight at 6:30 PM, the Dem Talking Points Podcast will be broadcasting live on Blog Talk Radio.  This will be an introduction to the relaunched show.  We'll discuss the GOP presidential candidates' foreign policy blunders and Chris Dodd's plan for mandatory community service. Plus a review of Naftali Bendavid's new book The Thumpin'.  To listen live click here.  The show will be archived and posted on this blog as soon as it is done, and should be available in iTunes shortly.

Earlier this week, Larry J. Sabato, the director of the University of Virginia's Center For Politics, focused his Crystal Ball column on Hillary Clinton's weaknesses in her race for the White House in 2008.  Now I like Larry Sabato, and I read his column often and enjoyed the latest book he edited, but I found this column to be a pretty inaccurate and biased piece.  It relies heavily on conjecture, and while predicting is certainly part of a crystal ball gazer/political analyst's job, I was surprised that Sabato rarely backed up his contentions with evidence, such as a poll.  What follows is a rebuttal of Sabato's main points.

In the fifth paragraph of the column (the first four deal largely with downplaying Clinton's early success) Sabato writes that "many Democrats--including African-American Dems--are worried that America isn't 'ready' for a black President. (Why America would be ready for a woman and not an African American is a mystery to the Crystal Ball.)"  Hmm.  Could the fact that, according to the 2006 exit poll, women make up 51% of the electorate, while African-Americans constituted 10%, be a factor?  It's a heck of a lot easier to win as a minority when, for electoral purposes, you're not actually a minority.

Sabato then begins a series of bullet points on Hillary Clinton's weaknesses.  First, she is "cold, calculating, and ruthless."  Yawn.  Later in the first bullet he writes that "almost every voter now has heard something about her leading role in covering up for her husband's serial infidelities over the decades. This is an unusual role for a spouse, even in the twisted world of politics. Most normal people cannot fathom it, except in the context of a supposed 'corrupt bargain' between two power-hungry individuals."  These are serious allegations for Sabato to make, ones that rests largely on poorly sourced claims from Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta's latest hatchet job, as well as Carl Bernstein's.  In fact, his reference to a "corrupt bargain" between the couple is based directly on a debunked claim from Gerth and Van Natta's book Her Way.

Sabato's next bullet claims that Clinton's high negatives will dramatically hinder her campaign.  He writes that "[i]n many surveys, Clinton runs 3-5 percentage points worse than the other widely known Democratic candidates, Obama and Gore, when matched up against the best-known Republican presidential candidates for November 2008."  That is true for some polls, but not for others.  In a poll I highlighted yesterday, Clinton has more or less the same numbers against the GOP as the rest of the Democratic field.  More importantly, Hillary Clinton has been able to weather attacks from the Republican machine for fifteen years now and is still able to out poll the GOP frontrunners.  This is a point Sabato admits later in his column, while observing the "muted reactions" that voters have had to the latest barrage of anti-Clinton books.  The fact is that voters have heard most of the slime that has been thrown at Senator Clinton, but is still unaware of many of her accomplishments.  I would be surprised if, for instance, many people knew about her work at the Children's Defense Fund or the role she played in supporting the very successful State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), as first lady.  These are things that will be highlighted by her campaign as the election cycle progresses.  Evidence of Senator Clinton's ability to win over moderate and conservative voters who are predisposed to be suspicious of her can be found in New York.  After being attacked as a carpet bagger throughout the 2000 senate race, Clinton won the race 55%-43%.  According to the Almanac of American Politics 2002, Clinton lost in traditionally conservative upstate New York 51%-47%.  Not a bad showing, but nothing spectacular.  In 2006 however, after voters had seen her record of competence and had gotten to know her better, she carried all but four of New York's sixty-two counties and won the race with 67% of the vote.  Most impressively, she posted a tremendous showing in upstate New York, winning 61% of the vote.  She also won the support of one in five Republican voters.

In a later bullet, Sabato writes that Clinton "would be the third deeply polarizing President in a row, following her husband's divisive and partially wasted tenure and George W. Bush's deeply disappointing turn at bat."  Leaving aside the slight at Bill Clinton (whose presidency is currently considered "good" by 71% of the country), there isn't a whole lot of proof for Sabato's statement.  Clinton could be polarizing, or she could not be.  Again, if her time as New York senator is any indication, she may have the ability to win over some Republicans and moderates.  Sabato also thinks that "partisan warfare would be at fever pitch from Day One" of a Hillary Clinton presidency.  This conveniently ignores Clinton's ability to reach across the aisle in her time as a senator, working with and earning praise from such conservatives as South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, whom she has teamed up with to tackle issues such as detainee rights and improved health care technology.

After writing that "Democrats would probably pay a sizeable price throughout the 2010 [elections] for a Clinton victory in 2008," a statement that involves an enormous amount of conjecture and guess work, even for a political analyst, Sabato goes on to obsess of the Clinton "scandals" despite noting the public's lack of interest in them.  In case you've forgotten how the American people felt about the Clinton impeachment, this should catch you up a bit.

Finally, Sabato bemoans that no one in the press is out there asking the tough questions about the Clintons' that he so bravely dares to put forth.   He asks concludes by sanctimoniously stating that "[w]e don't pretend to have the answers. But we are shocked and dismayed that more people aren't even bothering to ask the questions."  (The "we" here, refers to the Crystal Ball.)  Huh?  Let's see Chris Matthews spends every single night obsessing on Hardball about the Clintons' marriage and the possibility of another scandal.  Mara Liasson goes on Fox News Sunday and claims that all the Republican candidates beat Hillary, when they don't.  The list goes on and on.

Larry Sabato has every right to raise fair points about Hillary Clinton's potential stumbling blocks in 2008, and there are some.  But plenty of the claims he makes in this column suggest that he's looking through a pretty foggy crystal ball.