For practically the entire year, Hillary Clinton has had the benefit of being the Democratic frontrunner, and staying above the fray. Aside from a few random spats here and there, Clinton hasn’t felt the need to go after her primary rivals at all.
Why should she? Going on the offensive raises the profile of your opponents, increases the chance of raising your own negatives, and gives voters the impression that you’re worried. Indeed, when the “gender card” nonsense came up a couple of weeks ago, Clinton was able dismiss it quickly and effectively, arguing that leading candidates are always going to come under fire.
It’s what made Clinton’s comments in Iowa yesterday so interesting.
Fog may have diverted Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s plane from her campaign stop here on Tuesday, but that did not prevent her from continuing her attacks on Senator Barack Obama’s experience.
It was an odd moment. Mrs. Clinton, her voice piped in over a sound system, apologized for missing the event, expressed concern about the safety of food and toys from overseas and, pivoting off the overseas topic, tweaked Mr. Obama for saying on Monday that living overseas as a child had increased his experience in foreign relations.
Mrs. Clinton, who this week in Iowa has been making an issue of Mr. Obama’s experience, said the next president would face two wars and fraying alliances. She said she had traveled broadly and had “met with countless world leaders” and knew many of them personally.
“Now voters will judge whether living in a foreign country at the age of 10 prepares one to face the big, complex international challenges that the next president will face,” Mrs. Clinton said. “I think we need a president with more experience than that.”
It wasn’t an off-hand remark that Clinton offered casually. After her speech, Clinton campaign aides circulated the text to reporters in a press release titled, “New HRC Comments on Experience.” This was, in other words, an organized salvo aimed directly at Obama on his biggest perceived weakness.
There are two key angles to this: the substance and the broader political dynamic.
On the substance, Obama opened the door yesterday, noting that he lived in Indonesia as a child, which contributes to his knowledge “of how ordinary people in these other countries live.”
“I sit on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,” Obama said. “So I have frequent interaction with world leaders who come to visit here, and I take trips on various fact-finding missions, whether it’s to Iraq or Russia or Africa. But you know, probably, the strongest experience I have in foreign relations is the fact that I spent four years living overseas when I was a child in Southeast Asia.”
At a minimum, Obama could have said this a lot better. His foreign policy experience isn’t bad — it far exceeds that of Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani, for example — but he’s on much firmer ground sticking to his Senate Foreign Relations Committee work, and not pointing to his years overseas as his “strongest experience.” Or better yet, he might also consider emphasizing judgment over experience.
But in the campaign dynamic, notice that ferocity with which the Clinton campaign pounced. On the one hand, Obama offered Clinton an opportunity, but on the other hand, Clinton wouldn’t have bothered if she were still far ahead in Iowa and New Hampshire.
In this sense, yesterday’s criticism struck me as the first time all year Clinton actually sounded nervous. She went on the offensive because she had to, not because she wanted to. It also suggests that her campaign’s internal polling must also show the race tightening.
For what it’s worth, the Obama campaign hit back on the experience point: “Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld have spent time in the White House and traveled to many countries as well, but along with Hillary Clinton they led us into the worst foreign policy disaster in a generation and are now giving George Bush the benefit of the doubt on Iran.”
And Edwards is taking Obama’s side: “Now we know what Senator Clinton meant when she talked about ‘throwing mud’ in the last debate. Like so many other things, when it comes to mud, Hillary Clinton says one thing and throws another.”
It’s only going to get more intense.