Hillary Clinton has had a bad two weeks. Her campaign has been falling as much as those flags at the Sunday news gathering. Even though her staff is loathe to admit it, her momentum is stalled. From incoherent answers about drivers licenses to avoiding answering Iraq questions, to planting questioners to get canned answers out there, and her husband Bill trying to equate her rigidity and lack of being able to answer a question clearly with being swiftboated, and her throwing feminist ideas of equality with men aside by playing the va-jay-jay card so early. It has been a tough couple of weeks. The new dynamic emerged at the debate in Philadelphia two weeks ago, but didn't just spring from sharp criticism by her opponents. Clinton stumbled by offering fuzzy answers to some questions and refusing to take a stance on Gov. Spitzer's license plan for illegal immigrants.
Then Camp Clinton's damage control backfired as she was pounded for suggesting the "boys" ganged up on her. And Bill Clinton brought more scorn when he said the attempt to get an answer out of his wife on licenses verged on John Kerry Swift Boat territory.
Now Penn and company plan to stick to the high road, talking about Clinton's strength, experience and vision for America, fund-raising at a torrid rate and deploying Bill Clinton more.
They're also launching counterattacks, calling her opponents mudslingers. "I think it's sinking in to the electorate that people who had pledges to not attack Democrats were abandoning those pledges," Penn said.
Clinton remains way ahead in national polls, though some have shown a slip and a survey in early voting New Hampshire out yesterday showed a tightening race there.
The focus for staving off any Clinton collapse, though, starts in Iowa, where the candidates wooed party faithful at the state Democrats' biggest event of the year over the weekend.
Iowa Democrats said they didn't feel Clinton is headed down yet, but many thought the bruises were starting to show over her immigration nonposition and a new flareup over revelations that Hillaryland planted questions in two "conversations" with voters.
"I've turned a little more negative on her because of the immigration issue," said Terry Edwards, a trucker from Waukee, Iowa. "She flip-flops on that. I'd like to know where she stands."
Sounds to me like team Hillary is trying to repackage the victim paradigm from the va-jay-jay card into a picking on me just cuz card. I hope the American people don't get fooled. This woman is so robotic and inhuman, it is apparent. She has no core, no foundation, and is nothing more than a repeater of platitudes which disguise her socialist/communist agenda.
