Matt Bai (The Caucus,NY Times political blog): The colorful Republican consultant Mike Murphy, who has made more than his share of 30-second attack ads, once explained to me why you can’t listen to people who say they don’t like political advertising.
“You get a focus group together and you ask them which toothpaste they use,” Mr. Murphy told me, “and they say, Crest. And you ask them, ‘Is it because of the ads?’
“‘Oh no, of course not!’ they say. ‘I never listen to ads. Ads don’t affect me. I make up my own mind.’
“‘Oh, OK, so why do you use Crest?’
“‘Because four out of five dentists recommend it!’ ”
This anecdote, or some version of it, is probably a familiar trope in every ad agency in the country, and I’ve been thinking about it as I read all these stories that seem to mention, almost obligatorily, that using negative ads in Iowa is risky because Iowans don’t like them. Well, I guess. But in 2000, Al Gore mercilessly caricatured Bill Bradley as a guy who didn’t care a whit about farmers, and it worked just fine. Four years later, Howard Dean and Dick Gephardt bloodied each other all over Iowa TV; sure, they both lost, but that was probably more because both candidates successfully demolished their targets rather because their negativity backfired. Iowans can say they don’t respond to negative attacks, but that doesn’t mean we should believe them. Seems to me they’re just like rest of us, only dressed in more layers.
Clearly, the Clinton campaign thinks so. While the candidate herself has been keeping it pretty mild in her remarks, her surrogates have been reaching such nadirs of negativity that you almost have to admire the cold-bloodedness of it. Maybe that Clinton video spoofing the ‘Sopranos’ was a sign of things to come.
First there was Mark Penn, Clinton’s top strategist, on “Hardball,” setting a new record for uses of the word “cocaine” in 30 seconds. Next, President Clinton himself went on Charlie Rose to say that nominating Mr. Obama would be like “rolling the dice” with the nation’s future. And then this week of rhetorical atrocities came to a close with Bob Kerrey, the former senator, smoothly praising Mr. Obama by remarking on how comforting it would be to Muslims around the world to see an American president with the middle name “Hussein.”
Like a lot of reporters who’ve known him, I like Bob Kerrey, but I have too much respect for his intelligence to think that he didn’t know what he was doing, whether or not it was pre-planned.
This is more than just ugly politics. There seems to be, in the Clinton camp, a genuine and growing antipathy toward Mr. Obama personally, a sense that he has been accorded a status he has not earned. For whatever reason, Mr. Obama brings out in the Clinton world a not terribly flattering sense of entitlement that a John Edwards, for instance, does not.
One reason is that they just don’t think Mr. Obama belongs in the big time, and they can’t understand why the media won’t point this out. Another reason for the anger, though, is that Mr. Obama has directly challenged not just Hillary Rodham Clinton, but the Clinton era as a whole. He holds himself out as an indictment of the nasty ’90s, a chapter in Washington with which he alone, among the candidates, has no connection. Clintonism — that is, not the former president himself, but his philosophy and his legacy—has become a subtle but critical issue in this campaign as we head into the final few weeks in Iowa. It’s also the subject of my cover piece in the magazine this coming Sunday, so I won’t say much more about it here, but I hope you’ll read it and share your thoughts.
I’ve just arrived back in Des Moines today, where it is colder than the surface of Mars, so I’ll be blogging from here for the rest of the week. Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton are here now, and then later in the week Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney return as well. I expect to cover some 600 miles in a Hyundai four-wheeler to catch as many of their events as I can. Let me know, in the comments, if there’s anything you especially want to know about what’s happening out here, and I’ll try to be illuminating.
Barack Obama
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