THE NOTE: Obama Blasts Clinton on Iraq, Iran

October 11, 2007 — -- Yes, the Democrats and the Republicans who want to be president really are running in the very same year.

The top Republican candidates are currently skewering each other over who would seek the least amount of legal advice before attacking Iran.

The Democrats, meanwhile, are attacking the front-runner over a resolution that MIGHT be interpreted as emboldening the president to think about attacking Iran.

This is yet more evidence of the yawning divide between the parties (or, at least, what the candidates perceive as that divide). But in terms of real important distinctions between the candidates, the heat exceeds the light -- an indication of the urgency surrounding more than a few candidacies at this moment.

On the Democratic side, the fifth anniversary of a certain Senate vote authorizing war in Iraq is ample fodder for the Democrats who want to take on Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y. And (no surprise here) one candidate in particular is trying to draw as much attention as possible to the calendar.

"She was too willing to give the president a blank check," Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., told the AP's Philip Elliott (and you should know who "she" is by now). "There's been a little bit of revisionist history since that time, where she indicates she was only authorizing only inspectors or additional diplomacy." This is how it's about Iran: "The question is: Does she apply different judgment today?"

Obama is backing up that argument with a new online ad today. (Title: "Blank Check.") "While other Democrats fell in line behind George Bush, Barack Obama opposed the war from the start," a voice-over says. "And he's fighting to end it now, and to prevent history from repeating itself."

And Obama takes his argument against the Iran resolution to the op-ed page of the Union Leader: "Sen. Clinton says she was merely voting for more diplomacy, not war with Iran. If this has a familiar ring, it should. Five years after the original vote for war in Iraq, Sen. Clinton has argued that her vote was not for war -- it was for diplomacy, or inspections." His close: "This is not a debate about 2002; it's about the future, and in that debate I can run on, and not from, my record."

But this is inconvenient for Obama, as he tries to make a case against Clinton based on the Iran vote (yes, the vote that he missed): "If I thought there was any way it could be used as a pretense to launch an invasion of Iran I would have voted no," Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., tells the Chicago Tribune's Jill Zuckman. Obama often cites Durbin's vote against the Iraq war as evidence that senators should have known better than to buy into President Bush's arguments in 2002, Zuckman points out.

Clinton is avoiding direct engagement with Obama. Yesterday, she talked up expanding Internet access to rural areas (shortly before listening to the Goo Goo Dolls in a fund-raising concert; "The greatest band to ever hit the stage," said that great concert promoter Terry McAuliffe, per ABC's Eloise Harper).

Clinton also sat down with The Boston Globe editorial board yesterday, and offered up some quotes that are likely to be clipped and saved by oppo staffs. Though she's a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, she said she had no idea that Blackwater USA had immunity from prosecution in Iraq. "Maybe I should have known about it; I did not know about it," she said, per the Globe's Marcella Bombardieri.

On why she dropped her "baby bonds" proposal: "I have a million ideas. The country can't afford them all." (Some RNC operatives already like that theme.) And on her electability: "I am winning," said the candidate who does not read polls. "That's a good place to start."

Concerts aside, Clinton has spent the last few days talking -- horror of horrors! -- substance. "And you thought her husband was wonky," Time's Ana Marie Cox writes from Des Moines. "Hillary Clinton may not get angry on your behalf like John Edwards or inspire you like Barack Obama. But Iowans do not take their role in the electoral process lightly, and Clinton is counting on their level of seriousness to help her turn around the one state where she struggles to maintain the lead that has come so easily in the rest of the country."

Meanwhile, the latest GOP scuffle is the kind of ugly name-calling fight that all candidates say they hate (until they see a chance to pick one). It started when former governor Mitt Romney, R-Mass., said at Tuesday's debate that he would "sit down with your attorneys" to decide what's legal before launching an attack. This was an opening too wide for former mayor Rudolph Giuliani, R-N.Y., to resist.

"The Giuliani campaign has branded Romney's response 'the lawyer's test' and is trying to use the response as a way to portray the former Massachusetts governor as unsure of himself and less than commanding on issues of terrorism, which Giuliani considers his strength," ABC's Jake Tapper reports. Said Giuliani surrogate Adm. Robert J. Natter: "In these momentous decisions, we need leadership, not litigation."

The Wall Street Journal's editorial board slaps Mitt down: "Egad. Call in the attorneys? Perhaps it is Mr. Romney's experience in business that taught him to want lawyers at his elbow, given that no CEO can survive without them these days."

Romney's response brought the debate back to the fiscal issues he's been hitting Giuliani on in recent days. "If there's somebody that wants to talk about suing and lawyering, the mayor gets first place," Romney said, referring to Giuliani's legal case against the line-item veto, per the AP's Liz Sidoti. (Sorry, governor, tell us again why the lawyers answer is a "phony issue," but this one isn't?)

But HE started it, right guys? The backdrop here is that both of these frontrunners have an interest in making this a two-man race, "ignoring their rivals as they assail each other over taxes, spending, and national security," The Boston Globe's Michael Levenson reports. He dusts off this Rudy quote, from a campaign stop on Romney's behalf in 2002: "This is a man with real leadership qualities, and that's what we need in government right now. We don't need just other politicians."