A week has passed since Sen. Barack Obama stated during the CNN/YouTube that he would meet with some of the world's most noxious heads of state within his first year of office without setting preconditions, causing Hillary Clinton to warn about "being used" and the press to react to the exchange with heated interest.
The early judgment last week considered Clinton the victor. That appeared to shift a little yesterday following Bill Clinton's speech in Nashville to the Democratic Leadership Council. In it, the former president made remarks that struck some as an olive branch from his wife's campaign.
According to Politico, President Clinton told the audience that he was not going to get involved in "that little spat" before almost immediately interjecting himself into it. President Clinton went on to repeatedly stress that Democrats more or less agree on the need to increase diplomacy with problem states.
"We have to get back to more diplomacy," Clinton told the centrist group he used to head, "I've heard no fewer than four of our candidates say in the last month, remind us that in the middle of the cold war, in the darkest hours, we never stopped talking to the Soviets at some level. So no one disputes that."
His wording and his generally exacting nature on the campaign trail led some to view this as a plea for a truce between Obama and Sen. Clinton in a fight she does not feel she is winning. First Read advanced this outlook this morning:
"It's remarkable that more hasn't been made of Bill Clinton's truce-like comments regarding the Hillary-Obama spat on when/if to talk to rogue world leaders. Bill Clinton doesn't do things accidentally when it comes to campaign politics. Does this mean that the Democratic Party's foremost strategist decided this feud was hurting his wife -- and helping give Obama a lift?"
The Clinton campaign, however is disputing that Bill was offering any sort of truce. According to ABC's The Note, "The Clinton camp said the former president was speaking extemporaneously and did not coordinate his message with his wife's campaign -- good, since Obama seems not to have accepted any treaty terms."
Indeed, Obama has continued to fire shots at the Clinton campaign over foreign policy. The Dallas Morning News reported that, during a fundraiser in Dallas, Obama suggested a link between Sen. Clinton's views on foreign policy and the U.S. decision to go into Iraq saying that "The notion that somehow we have had an effective foreign policy by not talking to people is part of the perceived conventional wisdom that got us into this war in Iraq."
While the two frontrunners spar, David Yepsen of the Des Moines Register writes that it's the secondary candidates who are actually going to come out on top, especially in Iowa where John Edwards still leads in the polls:
"The two engage in this stuff at their mutual peril because Edwards - or even Richardson or Biden - could wind up the winner of this whole flap. For example, in the 2004 caucus campaign, front-runners Howard Dean and Richard Gephardt traded barbs with each other. Caucus-going Democrats listened to it and agreed: Both were right. Dean was too liberal to get elected. Gephardt was an old face. And the caucus-night victories went to John Kerry and John Edwards. This time, Edwards is running in first place in Iowa. Clinton and Obama trail. If Clinton and Obama engage in such negativity, they risk making each other radioactive and helping Edwards or one of the others."
Adam Smith of the St. Petersburg Times looks at the local ramifications of the standoff in another crucial primary state. He focuses on the effect Obama's implied approval of talks with Fidel Castro would have on the Cuban-American vote in Florida:
"Florida Obama supporters and other Democrats say they've heard little or no backlash among Hispanic supporters since last week's comment on meeting with leaders of rogue countries. In South Florida, anything that smacks of softness toward Fidel Castro or Hugo Chavez is politically volatile. So Ricky Arriola, a Cuban-American businessman in Miami who recently changed his party to Democrat to help Obama, immediately worried about the fallout when he heard Obama answer that question in South Carolina. 'But amazingly it's had no impact, there's been no buzz at all,' said Arriola, 38. 'If he'd said, 'End the embargo,' that would have been different, but the concept that you're willing to meet with some of those folks just isn't that inflammatory.'"
Many members of the blogosphere, however, are wondering why one week later the media is still obsessing over who won and lost, yet no one seems to be talking about what Clinton's and Obama's stances on foreign policy actually mean. It has caused more than one blogger to summon James Fallow's 1996 piece entitled "Why Americans Hate the Media" that contends that the media is more interested in covering the political consequences of a candidate's position on an issue than covering the issue itself.
Matthew Yglesias linked to Fallows' piece and then echoed his argument in a later post:
"A decision was made to say that Obama "lost" the initial exchange not because people wanted to say Obama was wrong on the merits, but because they wanted to say he was wrong on the politics. When that turned out not to be the case, the whole machine froze up -- it was like asking the punditocracy to divide by zero. It's John Edwards' hair all over again. The first votes won't be cast until months from now. Why not cover what the candidates are saying about things and whether or not those things make sense? Why not let the issues play out a little bit and just wait and see who gains the advantage?"
Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly's Political Animal responded to Yglesias by pointing out that, although the media didn't help matters, the candidates themselves were the ones responsible for letting the fracas perpetuate itself:
"This is a standard complaint about modern media coverage of politics, and God knows I'm sympathetic to it. I'd sure like the media to spend more time on substance. On the other hand, Clinton and Obama themselves didn't exactly take the chance to elevate this into a scholarly colloquium themselves, did they? Instead we got Clinton calling Obama "naive" and "irresponsible," and Obama hitting back by accusing Clinton of endorsing a "Bush/Cheney lite" foreign policy. Enlightening stuff, no? Is it any wonder the press covered this as a food fight rather than a serious debate?"
Sam Boyd at the American Prospect's blog Tapped criticizes the media for a slightly different reason saying that their coverage of the feud has demonstrated again that they are out of touch with the voters:
"The real issue, I think, is that the pundits don't quite seem willing to admit that the the Democratic primary electorate has different preferences, both in terms of policies and candidate attributes, than they do. This also, I think, explains why Clinton unwisely dove into the fight with Obama after the debate (for example she posted a clip of the exchange on her website and otherwise did her best to keep the story going). If the media were the constituency that mattered that would have been a good decision, but it wasn't because they media doesn't actually represent the Democratic party primary electorate's views. This is what makes me think, as more people start paying attention to the actual candidates rather than campaign journalism, Obama will make gains."
Ben Smith at Politico reports on another person who is fed up with the media's perceived inattention to the issues that really matter to voters: John Edwards. Edwards, Smith says, has launched "full court press against [the] media."
At least one person, however, is covering what's at stake in the foreign policy debate as Dennis Ross explores the pros and cons of engaging dictators in the New Republic and finds it reassuring that this sort of argument is occurring:
"So by all means, let the presidential candidates debate who we should meet with and under what circumstances. Let them debate our central objectives internationally and the means we have on our own or through others to achieve those objectives. That is the essence of statecraft. If we want to restore the effectiveness of our foreign policy and our standing in the world, those seeking to lead this country should thrash these issues out."