The Phony Campaign

2007-12-07 Update

It's been a long time since we looked at the Phony Campaign, and the only interesting thing is how uniformly uninteresting things have gotten:

Query StringHit CountChange Since
2007-11-24
"Hillary Clinton" phony355,000-166,000
"Ron Paul" phony291,000-122,000
"Barack Obama" phony239,000-123,000
"John Edwards" phony224,000-130,000
"Rudy Giuliani" phony200,000-91,000
"John McCain" phony195,000-156,000
"Mitt Romney" phony185,000-95,000
"Fred Thompson" phony184,000-89,000
"Mike Huckabee" phony153,000-4,000
"Dennis Kucinich" phony101,000-82,000

What's going on? The phony hits for candidates are dropping faster than the needles on my Christmas tree. Have they become less phony, somehow? That seems difficult to believe.

  • Moderate Joe voices criticism of Bill Clinton for his recent comments on the low quality of campaign coverage:
    Bill Clinton said Tuesday that if reporters covered the candidates' public records better, his wife's presidential bid would be far ahead of her rivals. […]

    "One percent of the press coverage was devoted to their record in public life. No wonder people think experience is irrelevant. A lot of the people covering the race think it is (irrelevant)," Clinton said to students at Keene State College.

    Joe has a number of reasons why Clinton's comments are misguided. But he fails to note this little ditty from a few months back, which is apparently down the Clinton memory hole:
    Senator Clinton touts her experience as one reason voters should make her president, but nearly 2 million pages of documents covering her White House years are locked up in a building here, obscuring a large swath of her record as first lady.

    Mrs. Clinton's calendars, appointment logs, and memos are stored at her husband's presidential library, in the custody of federal archivists who do not expect them to be released until after the 2008 presidential election.

    Griping about the press's failure to cover his wife's "experience" while at the same time making the relevant documents unavailable—now, that's phony!

  • There are reports—from the Clinton campaign—of push-polling dirty tricks against her:
    In a fundraising letter this morning, Clinton campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle accused Obama's campaign of calling Clinton supporters in Iowa and New Hampshire with phony poll questions meant to bash her.

    Clinton's Web site reported that a person claiming to be a pollster asked: "Which of these three options best defines your candidate? 1) Inconsistent on major issues. 2) A weak contender in the general election. 3) Not able to bring change to Washington."

    That is a tough question for a Clinton supporter to answer!

    Obama's campaign claims this is a "flat-out falsehood."

  • We still favor John Edwards in this race, however. He was in lovely Fort Dodge, Iowa a few days back, and apparently maintained a straight face throughout this:
    Committed Christians can be attracted to the Democratic side if the party's presidential nominee projects an honest interest in tackling moral issues, candidate John Edwards said here Sunday.

    Edwards pointed specifically to poverty and the fact that millions of people have no health care coverage.

    "Those are things that Christians care about, that people of faith in general care about," he said. "I think that Iowa caucusgoers and the faith community can spot a phony a mile away. They can tell, when they look at you and when they listen to you talk, whether you say what you really believe, whether it comes from within."

    If Iowans can spot a phony a mile away, my advice to the Edwards campaign would be: stay at least a mile away from the Iowa border from here on out.


Last Modified 2014-12-01 10:18 AM EDT