Welcome to the big leagues, Mike Huckabee: You get a traveling press horde, dirty tricks, tricky questions, and your very own Willie Horton...
(ABCNEWS.com)On the Democratic side, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's battle with Sen. Barack Obama paused long enough on Tuesday for former President Bill Clinton to make news yet again.
This time he's complaining about the media coverage -- surely, if reporters just paid more attention to wife's record, she'd be handed the nomination on the silver platter her husband thinks she deserves. "One percent of the press coverage was devoted to their record in public life," the former president said.
(We can think of two ways to get the press to focus more on Sen. Clinton's record. The first has to do with a couple million documents sealed away in Little Rock. The other has to do with not allowing the would-be "first laddie" anywhere near the trail -- or, at least, anywhere near the commission of news on the trail.)
And on the comment last week where he got his wife's campaign off-message by saying he was against the Iraq war "from the beginning," he says this to the Los Angeles Times' Michael Finnegan: "I regret that they were falsely represented by the press, who wants to make it a political story." (Surprising, since the appearance was non-political and all. . . .)
It's another rough stretch for Camp Clinton -- and we're not even counting the sudden, unexplained ditching of her theme song (yes, the Celine Dion number that was voted on with such fanfare a few months back is gone, ABC's Eloise Harper reports).
There's more legal woes for Norman Hsu, which "may see her confront potentially harmful fundraising questions of her own," Newsday's Martin C. Evans writes.
The AP's Seanna Adcox reports that Clinton's endorsement list in South Carolina black religious leaders isn't quite as long as it seems.
"Some of the backers were affiliated with religious ministries and outreach groups rather than churches, some were wives of ministers, two were church elders and at least two were not members of the churches listed beside their names," Adcox writes.
And count Clinton among those who can't be happy about President Bush's news conference on Tuesday, where he said the new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran wasn't changing his policies.
At Tuesday's (mostly tame) NPR debate, "This led to insinuations from several candidates that by casting her vote for economic sanctions," Christopher Cooper writes in The Wall Street Journal.
Former senator John Edwards, D-N.C.: "I think it's very clear that Bush and Cheney have been rattling the saber about Iran for a very long time." Clinton's response: "I understand politics and I understand making outlandish political changes but this really goes way too far."
"The timing of the new National Intelligence Estimate interfered with Clinton's game plan and forced her -- for an afternoon, at least -- back on the defensive," Newsweek's Richard Wolffe reports.
Obama slapped Clinton anew in a Des Moines Register editorial board meeting, saying that only he can create a "working majority for change" by attracting independents and Republicans to the Democratic ticket.
"Now what we know is that that will not happen with Senator Clinton. That's guaranteed," Obama said, per the Register's Thomas Beaumont.
Obama tries to rise above the fray again on Wednesday, with an endorsement by former senator Harris Wofford, D-Pa., and his own version of a JFK speech: "A Call to Service."
"We need your service, right now, in this moment -- our moment -- in history," Obama plans to say, per excerpts released by his campaign.
"I'm not going to tell you what your role should be; that's for you to discover. But I am going to ask you to play your part; ask you to stand up; ask you to put your foot firmly into the current of history."
Edwards is enjoying his front-row seat at this fight. "On a six-day swing through Iowa a month before the caucuses on Jan. 3, Mr. Edwards lightened up and reprised the role of the upbeat optimist he had in 2004, when he ran a close second in the caucuses," Julie Bosman writes in The New York Times.
Edwards: "Listen, I don't think America benefits from any personal fighting between candidates. . . . They don't care about fighting between politicians." (But he does.)
"The daily rhetorical sparring between Obama and Clinton has only made the Edwards campaign more confident that the best tactic to distinguish its candidate is to rise above the intraparty bout, which Edwards was largely instigating as recently as mid-November," Politico's David Paul Kuhn writes.
The deeper look: "The Democratic presidential candidates have transformed the race into a battle almost entirely over character and electability as the three leading candidates scramble for position in a tight race in Iowa and beyond," per ABC News.
Edwards deputy campaign manager Jonathan Prince: "We're happy to let them have their little spat. . . . When campaign comes to caucus time, the caucusgoers make their decisions on what really matters to them. It's about who these people are, and where they are going to take the country, and whether you can trust what they say."
Also in the news:
Giuliani has a new TV ad up today -- and it's him as commander-in-chief, invoking memories of Ronald Reagan's ending of the Iranian hostage crisis. "The best way you deal with dictators, the best way you deal with tyrants and terrorists, you stand up to them. You don't back down."
The Bloomberg/Los Angeles Times poll shows Huckabee's Iowa surge is translating into nation-wide support -- with most of it coming from Giuliani. "Huckabee has pulled into second place, close behind Giuliani, in the national survey of Republican-leaning voters," the Times' Janet Hook writes.
