Hillary Slings the Mud

There are legitimate and illegitimate reasons to oppose Hillary Clinton. An illegitimate one is to take the words of gossip books by journalist hacks as the gospel. Apparently nobody's doing that, since pretty much nobody's buying those books.

A legitimte reason to oppose Hillary exists in the form of Mark Penn, her pollster, who's apparently already playing dirty by testing negative messges about her chief rivals Barack Obama and John Edwards in push polls.

Eness-Potter, who tells us he's a 32-year-old nursing student, says that the call started with questions about the Iowa caucuses, whom he planned to vote for, and what he thought of President Bush. It also tested a bunch of positive messages about Hillary [...]

According to Eness-Potter, the interviewer hit him with a negative line about Obama's Iraq stance. "It was, 'He claims to promise an end to the Iraq War, yet after making these statements he voted to continue the war,'" Eness-Potter summarized. This apparently is a reference to Iraq war supplementals Obama supported.

A second negative line dealt with Obama's inexperience. "He says he'll bring new energy, but he's only served in the Senate for two years," Eness-Potter summarized.

On Edwards, he says, the first question was on the $400 haircut. He quoted it as follows: "John Edwards proudly promotes himself as a champion of the poor, and yet he went and got a $400 haircut," before continuing with the customary refrain of whether that made the respondent more or less likely to approve of Edwards.

This question was confirmed by the second person we contacted who claimed to have been polled by PSA, Ellen Ballas, a research project coordinator at the University of Iowa. She also confirmed the broad outlines of the negative messages about Obama.

Disgusting. And all too typical for a guy who's prior experience is in union-busting.

It appears that Hillary Clinton's team has swallowed the idea that the way to win in 21st century politics is to smear the hell out of your opponents. And to do it in a primary, in the guise of a classic push poll like this, recalls what George Bush's guys did to John McCain in South Carolina in 2000. Next thing you know, they'll be starting whisper campaigns. I always recoil when liberals say that we "have to find our own Karl Rove." I think we just did and his name is Mark Penn. Still think that's a good idea?