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A recently introduced bill could have far-reaching impact on the U.S. sugar industry, including American Crystal Sugar, a farmer-owned cooperative that locked out 1,300 Midwest workers on Aug. 1.
The chairman for Herman Cain’s Iowa effort says the campaign “relied more on the word of farmers than Washington regulators” in deciding to run an ad containing claims the Environmental Protection Agency says are false.
The Iowa Senate will remain under the control of a slim 26-25 Democratic majority when it reconvenes in January 2012.
[Commentary] It may have required the cooperation of all eight of the men on stage to make it happen, but the dynamics of the Democratic presidential race changed at a debate in Philadelphia Tuesday night, as Sen. Hillary Clinton had what may have been the worst moment of her campaign so far.
Each man played a part in what was effectively a group effort. Sen. John Edwards jabbed at her. Sen. Chris Dodd baited her into a split-screen exchange highlighting her so-called “doublespeak.” Sen. Joe Biden and Gov Bill Richardson clashed over foreign policy experience, serving to highlight her comparative lack of it. Tim Russert and Brian Williams not only asked the New York Senator pointed questions that were both thorough and biting, but they gave Clinton’s rivals plenty of opportunities to pick up where they left off. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, for his part, was less distracting than usual.
And Sen. Barack Obama, who won the night’s debate by a hair, finally said something.Although the Illinois Senator’s attacks on Clinton were relatively abstract — at times, perhaps even airy — he landed them authentically and with unexpected clarity. Achieving necessary change “requires us to be honest about the challenges that we face,” he said, in his first answer of the night. “This is not turning the page,” he said later, in response to a noncommittal answer from Clinton about directing archivists to release her communications with her husband during the former president’s two terms.
Of course, it did not hurt Obama’s cause that his campaign told the media to watch for attacks (in campaign-speak, they call it “contrast”). That meant that his audience would be willing to meet his criticisms halfway, allowing him to stop short of anything too critical.
Nor did it hurt Obama’s efforts that Edwards, the close second-place finisher, was willing to cover the more specific attacks on Clinton himself. The former North Carolina Senator proved, once again, that he is as rhetorically effective as any candidate. And, notably, Edwards did not change his message all that much much from what he has said in other recent debates. If his words seemed to resonate more than they have in the past, it was only because the other candidates shifted their messages to be more in line with his this time around.
But Obama carried the day over Edwards on two counts: expectations and personality. Because Edwards’s performances have been extremely consistent from debate to debate, the media will not be talking about him as much as they will talk about Obama, whose new strategy really turned heads. Obama was also the lucky recipient of several lighthearted questions — on topics including former Gov. Mitt Romney’s Obama-Osama confusion and Kucinich’s UFO sighting — which gave him opportunities to show more personality than he has in past debates.
Biden turned in a solid performance as well, though he lacked many opportunities to speak. When he did answer questions, he was persuasive enough to convince his opponents to agree with many of his answers, from the volatility in Pakistan to the cause of high oil prices. He was also the most credible critic of Clinton’s vote to classify the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist group on the stage, even if other candidates beat him to the punch.
Dodd engaged Clinton in what may have been her worst moment of the night, when he forced her to very obviously equivocate on the issue of giving driver licenses to undocumented immigrants in New York. This fit perfectly into the theme of Clintonian “doublespeak” that defined the majority of the debate. But it also put Dodd in the unfortunate position of attacking a policy that has strong support among many progressive bloggers, a constituency into which the Connecticut Senator has made significant inroads over the past several weeks. Still, the increased attention will work to his advantage.
Richardson, whose strong anti-war position (withdraw all troops “within six to eight months” with no residual forces) has helped him to draw some support from bloggers and the anti-war left, may have also alienated some of his supporters when he criticized the “holier than thou attitude towards Sen. Clinton” that his opponents seemed to be demonstrating. He must have forgotten that Clinton is his opponent, that he was physically outnumbered and rhetorically outmatched by the Holy Ones, and that many of his supporters have the same doubts about Clinton that Edwards, Obama, Dodd, Biden, and Kucinich do.
Clinton, for her part, came to the debate prepared with what appeared to be two primary methods of deflecting the criticisms that her campaign knew were coming. The first method was to mention how often she is attacked by the right wing as an attempt to shore up her progressive credentials. The second was to criticize the Bush administration for its failings. She probably needed a few more tricks up her sleeve, because the attacks kept coming long after she had worn out those responses.
For all of Clinton’s claims that she is a fighter who is ready to take on the right-wing, she failed to attack any of her opponents during the debate. Aside from her name-dropping of Sen. Dick Durbin, a high-profile Obama supporter who voted with Clinton in favor of the Iran resolution, and her claim that “to act like Social Security is in crisis is a Republican talking point,” there was hardly even a hint of criticism of her fellow Democratic candidates in anything she said.
Often in political campaigns, frontrunners choose not to respond to attacks from their lower-polling opponents for fear of elevating them, and that may have been Clinton’s strategy. But it is very difficult to ignore simultaneous attacks from four senators, a congressman, a governor, and two well-known journalists over the course of two hours on national television. For the first five minutes, her above-the-fray attitude made her seem cool and collected; for the remaining 115, she just looked oblivious.
Her reliance on right-wing caricatures of herself to demonstrate her ability to withstand attacks had been effective for her until now, but it will not work any longer. To prove to voters that she will be effective as the Democratic presidential nominee in debates and in front of hostile crowds, she must show some teeth.
Although Clinton remains the clear Democratic frontrunner, her position is worse today than it was a week ago. In the unlikely event that she loses the race for her party’s presidential nomination, pundits will point to Tuesday’s debate as the turning point of the campaign. In the more likely event that she wins the Democratic nomination for president, it will be nothing more than a stumble.
But, in any event, the Democratic primary just got a lot more interesting.
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