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ShareKANSAS CITY, Mo. - Just when the nastiness of November’s midterm election commercials was fading from the collective consciousness ...
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Check your calendar: It does say February 2007. The first presidential caucus of the 2008 race remains almost a year away. And already - keep your head down - trash talk is flying.
Setting aside pledges to keep things cordial, the Democrats’ star contenders - Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama - this week find their staffs engaged in what media wags are calling “an unusually early slugfest,” a “food fight” and even an “ugly, bare-knuckle brawl.”
And neither candidate started it. No, the annals of punditry shall trace this “remarkably caustic exchange” to an Obama-connected Hollywood mogul, David Geffen, who once was a generous friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton but now calls them reckless, ambitious and a “royal family” of liars.
Recant, the Clinton camp urges Obama, and the young senator - who vows to get politics out of the mud - replies: Who, me?
For Americans paying attention, campaign fatigue never struck so early. And political experts - who always pay attention - don’t expect the discourse to get any kinder.
“Democrats are used to food fights - more so than Republicans, who tend to be loyalists and have a next president in line,” said Dennis Goldford, professor of politics at Drake University in Iowa. “But this time the Republicans don’t really have a next in line, so they’ll have some food fights, too.”
The Clinton-Obama rift demonstrates as much as anything the speed at which political rancor catches fire and spreads, thanks to the Internet.
Geffen, with Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg, was host of an Obama fundraiser Tuesday night, attended by George Clooney, Barbra Streisand, Jennifer Aniston, Eddie Murphy, Ron Howard, Dixie Chick Natalie Maines and 300 others willing to pay $2,300 each.
The DreamWorks studio founder’s incendiary comments about the Clintons appeared the next morning in a New York Times column by Maureen Dowd. At 8:05 a.m. the Clinton campaign fired an e-mail to the media suggesting that Obama disavow Geffen and return the money raised.
Howard Wolfson, Clinton spokesman: “While Senator Obama was denouncing slash and burn politics yesterday, his campaign’s finance chair was viciously and personally attacking Senator Clinton and her husband.”
By noon, the blogosphere was ablaze with a retort by Obama camp: “It is ironic that the Clintons had no problem with David Geffen when he was raising them $18 million and sleeping at their invitation in the Lincoln Bedroom.”
Says University of Kansas political scientist Burdett Loomis: “This level of acrimony, this early and so quickly - ba-boom, ba-boom - it’s remarkable.”
At this stage in the 2004 presidential campaign, Loomis notes, “YouTube didn’t exist, there were fewer blogs, and people thought less of this kind of exchange. ... Today, you have this rapid-response ability, and the debate gets coarser, it gets simplified, and spreads very quickly.”
Last week Sen. Sam Brownback’s camp questioned the credibility of fellow Republican Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, for switching in recent years from abortion rights to anti-abortion.
Another GOP presidential aspirant, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, has been saying nasty things about the Bush administration. On the stump Thursday, McCain called the administration’s efforts in Iraq a “train wreck” and attacked its approach to global warming as “long overdue.”
Democrat John Edwards has been rhetorically needling his former Senate colleagues, including Clinton, to show “courage” and “tell the truth” that their support of the Iraq invasion was a mistake. And finally there’s New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson who on Thursday repeated his call for Democratic contenders to sign a pledge to not attack one another.
“I think voter fatigue may already be setting in, even at this early date,” said Bill Hoch, a former political adviser and Democratic operative in Kansas. “The proliferation of communication channels surrounding the presidential election season is unprecedented….
“You have an insatiable appetite for a `Desperate Housewives’ level of entertainment, and these candidates are providing that in abundance.”
Even political players such as attorney Kim Wells, an adviser to former Kansas Sen. Bob Dole’s 1996 Republican presidential campaign, express some weariness: “When people like me get sick of hearing about it (presidential candidate sniping), I can only imagine what the casual observer will think.”
Does the casual observer even care?
“Most voters aren’t even looking this early in the campaign,” said Goldford. “There’s still time for this (Clinton-Obama bout) to blow over.”
For his part Obama has refused to renounce his association with Geffen, who raised $1.3 million in the campaign fundraiser.
“It’s not clear to me why I’d be apologizing for someone else’s remarks” about the Clintons, the senator from Illinois said.
Clinton, too, is striving to appear above the fray, pledging “to run a positive campaign about the issues.” (And in doing so, the senator from New York has accused the bulk of her Democratic opponents, including Obama, of minimizing the threat that terrorists pose.)
Nothing suggests the Democrats will agree to a cease-fire, said Goldford. “But they certainly don’t want nuclear war, because in nuclear wars nobody is left standing.”
