Barack Obama is attacking Hillary Rodham Clinton. Rudy Giuliani is ridiculing Mitt Romney. And John McCain is savaging Rudy Giuliani.
Put on your bibs, load up on Jell-o, and let thedrumsticks fly.
The post-Thanksgiving political food fight has begun in earnest, a sign of heightened urgency as the presidential candidates begin the final, six-week sprint to Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucuses.
“Actually, I think it’s even less than six weeks because the campaigns figure they’ve got to tone it down around Christmas,” said presidential handicapper David Yepsen, a columnist for the Des Moines Register. “I mean, you can’t be out here bashing your opponents on Christmas Eve.
“Part of what’s going on here is that the candidates are trying to get these last messages in before the window closes,” he said. “So this is really the last shot they have to make a final impression, particularly in this state.”
The other part of what’s going on is the remarkable fluidity of the race. In recent days, Obama has pulled even with Clinton in some polls of Iowa Democrats, while Mike Huckabee has come within striking range of Romney, the Republican front-runner.
With so much at stake, the candidates have abandoned any pretense of remaining above the fray. Obama even invoked his wife, Michelle, in arguing that Clinton’s tenure as first lady does not qualify her for the presidency.
“I don’t think Michelle would claim that she is the best qualified person to be a United States Senator by virtue of me talking to her on occasion about the work I’ve done,” the junior senator from Illinois told ABC in an interview that aired last night. “Senator Clinton is claiming basically the entire eight years of the Clinton presidency as her own, except for the stuff that didn’t work out, in which case she says she has nothing to do with it.”
The rhetoric is just as pointed on the Republican side, with Giuliani ripping the universal health care plan that Romney signed while governor of Massachusetts.
“Mitt-care is much more like Hillary-care than anything any Republican’s everproposed,” he said.
Romney fired back during an interview with radio talk show host Laura Ingraham, saying Giuliani is “the same as Hillary Clinton on most of those social issues.”
Romney received an assist from McCain, who slammed Giuliani during an interview on Fox News.
“He has no national security experience that I know of,” the Republican senator from Arizona told Megyn Kendall. “He’s never been to Iraq. He was a member of the Iraq Study Group and was either fired or quit from a very important commission that was trying to figure out the way forward in Iraq.”
