"Battered by Poll, Clinton Hits Back"

NY Times' political blog, The Caucus:

DES MOINES – Hillary Rodham Clinton’s aides went to bed Saturday night with the bad news from the new Des Moines Register poll on their minds, and they woke up Sunday and quickly pounced on the poll’s new No. 1, Barack Obama, with teeth bared.

Clinton aides made three hits on Mr. Obama within just a few hours – on health care, campaign spending, and candor – yet denied that they were acting out of concern about the new Register poll, which showed Mr. Obama in a statistical dead heat with Mrs. Clinton with less than five weeks to go until the Jan. 3 caucuses.

Mrs. Clinton’s spokesman, Howard Wolfson, appeared on CBS’s “Face the Nation” with Mr. Obama’s strategist, David Axelrod, and engaged in some warmed-over jousting about the candidates’ health insurance plans (they have been skirmishing for two weeks now about whether the respective plans would cover everyone). Then Mr. Wolfson threw a days-old story in Mr. Axelrod’s face: That the Obama campaign used an Obama political action committee to spread around money in states that hold the first primaries and caucuses.

Mr. Wolfson accused the Obama campaign, with the PAC, of “taking in money from lobbyists despite the fact he said he doesn’t take money from lobbyists, taking in money from lobbyists and giving money out to candidates in New Hampshire and Iowa to support his presidential campaign.”

“I would call on David – David, will you shut down Senator Obama’s slush fund?” Mr. Wolfson said.

Mr. Axelrod said that he did not think there was any money left in the PAC, but did not address head-on whether there was anything wrong with the way the PAC money was used.

What Mr. Obama has done – spending a portion of the remaining funds from his winding-down leadership PAC in a way that helps his campaign – appears to stay within the letter but not the spirit of campaign finance rules. Although his actions seem to comply with Federal Election Commission rulings, he has in effect drawn on a second pool of political contributions to make payments that benefit his presidential campaign.

Of course, before the campaign officially began all the serious presidential candidates used such political action committees to make similar payments to build good will in pivotal states. Not all, however, continued to tap their political action committees that way through mid-2007.

A few hours later, the Clinton campaign accused Mr. Obama of “re-writing history” by saying that he had not been planning for years to run for president like “some of the other candidates.” The campaign included news articles and statements of friends or relatives of Mr. Obama saying that he had been thinking of running for president for at least a decade.

Mr. Obama, speaking at a news conference in Des Moines today, shared his view about the Clinton onslaught.

“I think that folks from some of the other campaigns are reading the polls and starting to get stressed and issuing a whole range of outlandish accusations,” Mr. Obama said. “Everything that we’ve done is in exact accordance with the law.”

Howie P.S.: Hillary herself continued along the same lines later in the day as reported here, again in The Caucus: "An Attack, From the Candidate’s Mouth." turneresq's recommended diary on Kos gives a blogger's eye view.

Barack Obama