In the book, Edwards says her husband, John, admitted just days before announcing his run for president in 2006 to his now widely publicized extramarital affair. According to the New York Daily News, she writes that she then asked her husband not to run for president in the 2008 campaign, to protect their family from public scrutiny.

Edwards eventually finished second in the Iowa Caucuses to Barack Obama before dropping out and endorsing him. Clinton finished third and was dealt what many consider a fatal blow to her presidential aspirations. Now, former Clinton pollster Mark Penn tells ABC News that it would have been a very different race if Edwards hadn’t run.

“Most likely it would have been a two-way race and would have released a lot of voters who focused on demographics . . . voters who would later vote for Hillary Clinton.”

This isn’t the first round of former Clintonites blaming their loss, at least partially, on Edwards. When news of the affair first broke last August, former Clinton Communications Director Howard Wolfson said if Edwards had been forced from the race earlier his candidate “would have won Iowa” and been the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee.

But polling data from the night of the Caucuses does tend to contradict Penn and Wolfson’s points.

In an interview with former Iowa Independent writer John Deeth, University of Iowa political science professor David Redlawsk said a Caucus night poll showed 82 percent of Edwards supporters said they would support another candidate and 18 percent would not.

“When we asked which candidate they would then support, 32 percent said Clinton and 51 percent said Obama,” he said. “Had this actually happened statewide, Obama would have been even further ahead of Clinton.”

Now these were voters who spent the campaign listening to all three before deciding on who to support, so their opinions could have been much different if Edwards were never involved in the race from the beginning. But as Deeth pointed out back in August, the Clinton campaign’s focus on experience and being “ready to go on day one” was in stark contrast to the campaigns of Edwards and Obama, where change from the status quo was the rallying cry.

The Clinton that emerged later in the 2008 campaign that garnered support from mostly older and working class voters might have done better in Iowa, but that campaign message seemed to evolve because her defeat in Iowa and several early states, so it didn’t do her much good in the Hawkeye State.

In the end, it’s impossible to know what might have been.

President-elect Barack Obama's nominees include James Jones for national security adviser, Hillary Clinton for secretary of state and Robert Gates for secretary of defense. (WDCpix and Wikimedia Commons)

In 1936, the Republican Party nominated for vice president an uncompromising critic of the New Deal named Frank Knox. A veteran of Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, Knox attained prominence as a Chicago newspaperman, branding Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s economic agenda “alien and un-American” and repeatedly proclaiming its failure.

Four years later, knowing Knox’s prestige among the GOP faithful and mindful of the need for national unity as Europe fell to the Nazis, President Roosevelt made Knox, who agreed with Roosevelt on the scope of the German threat, his secretary of the Navy.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

It was possible to look this morning at President-elect Barack Obama’s national-security team and see the ghost of Knox. Obama’s choice for secretary of defense, Bob Gates, is George W. Bush’s secretary of defense, making Gates the first-ever cabinet secretary to carry over from an administration of the opposing political party. His choice for national security adviser, Jim Jones, was until February of last year a four-star Marine general and NATO commander who commanded widespread Washington respect. And his choice for secretary of state, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, was his chief rival for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Yet at his press conference Monday morning, Obama made clear that he’ll be the one setting the parameters of the national-security debate in his administration. Reiterating his agenda, he emphasized his goal of pulling combat troops out of Iraq in 16 months, refocusing on the fight against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons, strengthening international institutions and recalibrating the balance between civilian and military components of the national-security apparatus. “I will be setting policy, [and will be] responsible for presenting the vision [that]… this team will implement,” Obama said.

The interplay between the outsized personalities on Obama’s national-security team and Obama’s ability to set the agenda looks likely to be a key undercurrent of the new president’s entry onto the global stage — as does the domestic politics of his appointments.

“I don’t think there has been a stronger foreign policy team or one composed of more established, leading players in the national security community since the Second World War,” said David Rothkopf, a scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for International Peace and author of “Running The World,” a history of the National Security Council. “This is precisely the kind of group that is called for in times as rife with challenges as ours. They are sound, pragmatic, realistic and willing to advance a common vision. I really don’t think we could do better.”

The group earned early praise from progressives as well, particularly given Obama’s focus on progressive goals for the Middle East like “responsibly ending the war in Iraq,” “preventing the spread of nuclear weapons to Iran… [and] seeking a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians.” Progressive Democratic political consultant Matt Stoller said secretary-designate Clinton’s “challenge is Israel and Palestine. Her success is tied to that situation.”

Taylor Marsh, a political analyst, today praised both Clinton’s nomination and what it said about Obama. “Hillary Clinton as secretary of state foreshadows opportunity for Obama, especially in the Middle East and with Iran; by picking a tough advocate who can pave the way for the change, he obviously intends to bring through his diplomatic muscle,” Marsh said. “Some on the left are talking about Obama appointing a hawkish national-security team, but the people he’s chosen reveal just what a tough commander in chief he intends to be. No daylight for dovish talk when Obama begins to redeploy from Iraq.”

Jeremy Ben-Ami, a top domestic-policy aide to President Bill Clinton and executive director of the progressive American Jewish lobby J Street, was enthused by Obama’s picks. “The national security team announced today by President-elect Obama brings in-depth understanding of and hands-on experience in what it takes to achieve security through peace in the Middle East,” Ben-Ami said. “Now it’s up to the president-elect to give this team the green light to pursue active diplomacy from day one of the new administration. They can rest assured that the overwhelming majority of the Amercan Jewish community will stand with them in their active pursuit of a diplomatic end to Middle East conflicts.”

Whether and how such green lights will be communicated represents a test for Obama’s approach to governing. Both he and Vice President-elect Joe Biden emphasized repeatedly at the press conference that a requirement for inclusion on the team was broad acquiescence to the Obama agenda. Obama proclaimed himself “responsible for presenting the vision” that the team “will implement.” The foreign-policy aspect of his presidency largely depends on whether he’s strong enough as an executive to maintain the cohesion that he promised.

In several policy areas, Obama appeared to have chosen his course — with Iraq foremost among them. On Friday, the neoconservative commenter Max Boot boasted that the appointment of Gates and Jones “all but puts an end to the 16-month timetable for withdrawal from Iraq.” Instead, Obama explicitly said that he still intends to withdraw combat troops from Iraq in 16 months, though he will “will listen to the recommendations of [military] commanders.” He praised the recently passed status-of-forces agreement with the Iraqi government — which demands U.S. military withdrawal from Iraqi towns and cities by June 2009 and full U.S. withdrawal by December 2011 — as providing “a glide path” out of Iraq. And he introduced Gates by stating that he “will be giving Secretary Gates and our military a new mission as soon as I take office: responsibly ending the war in Iraq through a successful transition to Iraqi control.” In other words, Gates, a key proponent of the 2007 troop surge that Obama opposed, will have the opportunity to shape how the U.S. exits Iraq but not to litigate whether the U.S. ought to stay.

Still, Boot’s comments highlight a dilemma that Obama’s appointments pose to conservatives. Neither Gates nor Jones would have accepted Obama’s invitations had they been out of step with his strategic goals. With so much of the conservative approach to foreign policy having been implemented by the Bush administration to disastrous consequences, Gates’ Pentagon success — represented most significantly by the reduction in violence in Iraq under his watch — has been a rare point of GOP pride, as Sen. John McCain pointed out during the campaign. Yet now that Gates and Jones have signed on to the Obama agenda — as have many so-called foreign-policy realists who used to operate in the Republican orbit — the Obama administration has absorbed the viable strains of foreign-policy thinking that haven’t been proven inadequate by recent events or politically repudiated. Conservatives, and particularly the congressional GOP, face the difficult political choice of acquiescing to an emerging progressive foreign-policy consensus or opposing it by championing failed policies that voters in 2006 and 2008 overwhelmingly rejected.

Brandon Friedman, a U.S. Army veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, summed up his take on the emerging Obama administration by remembering Dick Cheney’s promise to U.S. troops at the 2000 Republican National Convention. Cheney, blasting the Clinton administration’s defense policies, said the arrival of George W. Bush in the White House would mean “our men and women in uniform will once again have a commander in chief they can respect, one who understands their mission and restores their morale.”

“The difference between August 2000 and December 2008,” said Friedman, a member of the veterans’ organization VoteVets, “is that if we said the same thing today about the current and incoming administrations, it would actually be true.”

Spencer Ackerman writes for our sister site, the Washington Independent.

Harkin was asked to lead the group’s efforts on prevention and public health. Sens. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., and Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., were also asked to be a part of the effort.

Doctors and business and consumer groups are gearing up for an effort to improve care and bring about 46 million uninsured people into the system, something Obama and Clinton made centerpieces of their presidential campaigns.

And lawmakers on Capitol Hill are lining up to try to lead what is expected to be a long but high-profile legislative campaign.

In the recording, Clinton praises McCain and criticizes Obama on the subject of experience. The former first lady was quoted when she and Obama were in the middle of their heated contest for the Democratic nomination.

Clinton Spokeswoman Kathleen Strand told the Associated Press that the calls were not approved.

“Senator Hillary Clinton does not approve this message, and as she criss-crosses the country, she has said time and again that the choice in this election could not be more clear,” she said. “The McCain/Palin ticket offers only more of the same failed policies, while the Obama/Biden ticket offers the vision, leadership and positive solutions we need. I wonder why the Republicans aren’t using those words?”

Here is the text of the call:

I’m calling for John McCain and the [Republican National Committee.} Listen to what Hillary Clinton had to say about John McCain and Barack Obama.

“In the White House, there is no time for speeches and on the job training. Sen. McCain will bring a lifetime of experience to the campaign, and Sen. Obama will bring a speech he gave in 2002. I think that is a significant difference.”

This call was paid for by the Republican National Committee at 866-558-5591, and authorized by McCain-Palin 2008.

The campaign has used this bit of audio from Clinton before in a telelvision ad aired in Colorado, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin in August.

Dianne Bystrom (Iowa State University photo)

The first part of a lengthy study comparing coverage of presidential hopefuls in two newspapers — one in Iowa and one in New Hampshire — is complete, and the statistics it unearthed should give female journalists pause.

The study, which compares newspaper coverage of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Sen. Barack Obama and former Sen. John Edwards leading up to this year’s first two presidential nominating contests, found that 57 percent of the stories that focused on Clinton were written by female journalists, and that more of the coverage Clinton received was negative as compared to Obama and Edwards.

Titled “Gender and U.S. Presidential Politics: Early Newspaper Coverage of Hillary Clinton’s Bid for the White House,” the study remains a work in progress for Dianne Bystrom, director of the Carrie Chapman Catt Center for Women and Politics at Iowa State University. But Bystrom presented an initial report to the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association based on her work thus far, and she agreed to speak with the Iowa Independent about her findings.

“When I’ve talked with one of my reporter colleagues about [women being more likely to cover Clinton], he claimed that was because a lot of female reporters asked to cover Hillary Clinton,” Bystrom said. “And that could very well be the case.”

Women journalists often want to cover female candidates, but also often over-compensate against perceived biases in their reporting.

“In looking at past research, one of the things that we’ve found is that women reporters are harder on women candidates than male reporters are,” Bystrom said. “What we theorize about that is that women don’t want to be charged with going easy on a woman candidate. At the same time, we think that male reporters are fearful of being charged with sexism if they go hard on a woman candidate.”

In November, Bystrom will present an updated version of the study to the National Communications Association. She hopes to offer that organization more of a comparison piece of the coverage in the two states, based on her analysis of reporting from The Des Moines Register and Concord Monitor.

“One of things I’m interested in looking at, for example, is if Clinton was portrayed as less viable by The Des Moines Register than the Concord Monitor because of the different results in those two states. … I also want to look at the male and female reporters’ coverage of the candidates in terms of issues and negativity in coverage,” Bystrom said.

“Although this is just hypothesis, and may or may not be a part of our results, it could be that Hillary Clinton’s coverage in those papers is more negative than that of the males because it is mostly women covering her and the female journalists are feeling the need to go hard on her. That could be a factor.”

Initial Study Results

To prevent a personal bias from corrupting data, two undergraduate students coded the newspaper articles collected from the Monitor and Register. A graduate student then entered the collected data and ran the statistical tests. In all, 137 articles from the New Hampshire newspaper and 126 stories from Iowa newspaper are represented in the study.

From the pool of 263 news articles, Clinton was the primary candidate focus of 51 and received the most overall primary news coverage. When looking at the two papers separately, however, Clinton received slightly less coverage than Obama and Edwards in The Des Moines Register. A total of 18 articles in the Iowa paper focused on Clinton, while Edwards and Obama each had 20. A significant amount of coverage — 13 percent in New Hampshire and 10 percent in Iowa — focused on the Clinton versus Obama candidacies.

Of those 51 articles focusing on Clinton, however, 22 percent were coded as negative. Comparitively, just one story, or 2 percent, of the 41 articles focusing on Obama was considered negative. None of the 31 articles focusing on Edwards were coded as negative.

While 66 percent of the news articles focused on Obama and 61 percent of those focused on Edwards were considered to be positive, only 33 percent of Clinton’s articles were coded as positive.

It’s All About Image

“One of the good news things is that I really was expecting more image coverage of Clinton in those two newspapers,” Bystrom said. “And really — at least on the overall theme of image — there were not significant differences.”

While on the surface the trend of less statistical difference between male and female candidates in terms of image coverage appears to be a good thing, Bystrom said it is likely an indication of men garnering more image coverage.

“It’s not that women are being covered less in terms of their image, but what’s happening is that men are being covered more in terms of their image, which basically takes the statistical difference away,” she said. “So, it’s not that papers are covering a woman’s image less, but that they are covering a man’s image more. It makes the statistics appear more equitable.”

There is little doubt that image continues to be a media focus for women candidates and, according to Bystrom, the entrance of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin into the national mix has brought the issue once again into the forefront.

“I haven’t done any studies on Sarah Palin, so anything I say would just be based on my personal observations,” she said. “although I’m also sure there will be a lot of studies on her candidacy. People will argue that the media is talking about her children because she’s putting them on center stage, or that the media is discussing her family because she put her family out there. But Joe Biden has told fairly provocative stories about his family, about how he lost his wife and raised his two sons. Although I remember that being discussed in the media, I don’t recall it being the focus of his coverage. I do think that Palin is also being covered a lot in terms of her appearance.”

Bystrom said that a female reporter recently contacted her for comment on an article about Palin.

“A reporter from a large, respected newspaper that was not in Iowa sent a request wanting political science experts to contact her because she was doing on a story on how we would make-over Sarah Palin,” Bystrom explained. “Would we give her a new haircut? Would we change her glasses? Would we change her wardrobe? Although I didn’t respond, what I wanted to respond was how we might wish to make-over Joe Biden. Or, what about John McCain? Or even Barack Obama?”

A different female reporter wanted to know about Clinton’s color choice.

“Another time I was being interviewed by a woman reporter from a respected newspaper and the focus was on Hillary Clinton,” she said. “We were talking about the research, about how woman are often covered based on appearance. This reporter said, ‘This research is all very interesting, but do you think that Hillary Clinton is trying to telegraph to voters different things by her choice of color of pantsuit?’”

Women candidates, according to Bystrom, are told the same things that men candidates are told about color. “Wear what is comfortable and in a color that looks good on camera,” she said. “Clinton and other candidates aren’t telegraphing things to voters with their color choices. They are doing what we train candidates to do — wear colors that look good on you and look good on camera. It’s the same reason you see male politicians sporting red and ice blue ties.”

Of course it’s difficult to write about how the media reported on Clinton’s image without mentioning the now infamous news report about her lower-cut shirt.

“There was the long story in the Washington Post about Hillary Clinton’s cleavage and what she might be trying to tell voters with it,” Bystrom said. “We would just be appalled if there was a story about a man and a part of his body and what he might be trying telegraph to voters. Like if a man wore tight pants. What does that mean to voters?”

Doesn’t Clinton = Negativity?

It’s commonplace for Bystrom to be asked if negativity in the media is focused more on Clinton as an individual than it is on women in general.

“Hillary Clinton is Hillary Clinton,” she said. “She’s going to get some negative coverage just because she is Hillary Clinton and has been in the public eye for as long as she has been. But she’s gotten equitable and good media coverage when she ran for U.S. Senate, even in 2000 when she first ran. She received even more positive coverage in 2006.

“Another reason that I say this is not just Hillary is because of the media coverage Elizabeth Dole received when she sought the Republican nomination. This was at a time when women were receiving much more equitable coverage whether they were running for governor or for senate. We were seeing trends of more equitable coverage, beginning in 1998. But then we looked at Elizabeth Dole. She got less media coverage, more negative coverage and more image-related coverage than all of her male counterparts — even those who were polling below her.”

That leads to the hypothesis that when women seek the highest office, they are going to be treated in stereotypical ways.

“It’s disturbing trend because we’ve taken a step back,” she said. “What we’re seeing is the type of coverage that women were getting in the 1980s and early 1990s when we look at Hillary Clinton’s presidential run. And I think we’re going to see the same type of thing with Sarah Palin.

“I’ve studied Hillary Clinton’s media coverage since she was First Lady. What I can tell you is that Hillary Clinton is capable of getting good media coverage. Where she gets negative media coverage is when she was First Lady and when she runs for president. My theory on that is that we, as a society, have become more accepting of women running for legislative and statewide executive offices. But it seems to be that when someone like Hillary Clinton doesn’t behave in a way that we think a First Lady should behave, or she is running for the nation’s top office, that she gets more negative coverage.”

Bystrom says that study after study has shown the Clinton was treated differently by the media.

“I think Clinton’s campaign was covered in every city, including my own, differently than her male opponents,” she said. “Every single study I’ve seen — be it newspapers, be it television, be it radio, be it magazines — has concluded that Clinton was covered differently than her male opponents, with most studies focusing on the difference between her coverage and Obama’s. The thing that stands out is that she was covered much more negatively than Obama. Of course, that wasn’t the only factor in her race — but it did affect her race. I would say that one of the factors that hurt Hillary Clinton throughout her candidacy was her media coverage.”

More than 37.2 million people tuned in for coverage of the third night of the 2008 Republican National Convention, which featured Sarah Palin’s much anticipated national debut.

Wednesday night’s RNC broadcasts attracted just a 1.1 million fewer viewers than Barak Obama’s record-breaking speech on day four of the Democratic convention.

Coverage of day three of the GOP convention drew a large female audience (19.5 million) — 5.2 million more women than tuned in for day two of the Democratic convention, when Hillary Clinton addressed the delegates, and 6.9 million more women than watched Joe Biden accept the Democrats’ vice presidential nomination last Wednesday night.

Viewers age 55 and older also continued to dominate the RNC’s TV audience, with 25.2% of all Americans in that age group — 17.9 million people — watching Wednesday night’s coverage on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, FOX News Channel, and MSNBC.

“I’m getting on board with Barack Obama. I think he’ll be an excellent president,” said Kathleen Krehbiel, of Solon., who came here as a Clinton delegate. She said she no longer wanted to carry out the “pretense” that Clinton could win.

Krehbiel and Stephanie Imhoff, another Clinton delegate, got up before the delegation this morning and urged people to vote for Obama, even engaging in his signature rallying cry: “Fired up. Ready to go.”

When they walked back to their seats, Obama delegate Sandra Pope of Ottumwa, opened her arms and said, “Welcome girls. That’s all I’ve got to say.”

Rich Peters called the speeches a powerful “one-two punch” for Democrats. With access to the Pepsi Center in Denver, site of the convention, Peters talked to dozens of female party activists throughout the day Tuesday, looking for someone to express the widely reported anger and disunity associated with the Democratic nomination fight between former First Lady and U.S. senator Clinton of New York and Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama, a U.S. senator from Illinois.

“I couldn’t find a single one,” Peters said.

Peters said the crowd Tuesday appeared pleased that Clinton was taking the fight to U.S. John McCain, R-Ariz., the Republican presidential candidate.

Clinton had several well-timed barbs aimed at McCain.

“It makes sense that George Bush and John McCain will be together next week in the Twin Cities, because these days they’re awfully hard to tell apart,” she said, referencing the Minnesota site of the GOP convention next week.

“I thought, no way was she going to be that aggressive,” Peters said.

Peters is a supporter of Obama who earned entry to the Democratic National Convention by winning a video contest sponsored by the party and Internet giants Google and YouTube.

His winning video is expected to be shown sometime this week at the convention. Peters has posted a number of political videos on YouTube.

Rich Peters, a recent University of Iowa Law School graduate who grew up in Carroll, shot video for YouTube, the popular video sharing Web site, during the convention. He earned access to the Pepsi Center in Denver by winning a video contest.

Peters told Iowa Independent in a phone interview that he was surrounded by women in the Pepsi Center who responded to Michelle Obama’s family themed keynote pitch for her presidential candidate husband, U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill. He watched the audience intently and talked to a number of women in attendance about their impressions.

“What cameras aren’t going to pick up are the words people used to agree with Michelle,” Peters said.

He added, “The neatest thing was being amongst the crowd. Every couple of seconds there would be someone yelling something positive.”

With memories of a hard-fought primary and caucus season looming in the minds of many activists, there is concern from the Obama camp about reaching supporters of his chief rival in that process, U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y. — particularly women.

“I did not know going in whether there would be unity,” said Peters, an Obama supporter. “But as soon as I got boots on the ground, I can’t tell you how much energy there was, and it was all positive.”

Earlier Monday, Peters appeared for a segment on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” with host Joe Scarborough, a former conservative congressman from Florida.

Peters brought along a bag of Cheetos as a joke related to Scarborough’s references to bloggers as Cheeto eaters.

For YouTube, Peters interviewed New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. Peters also talked with environmental activist Robert Kennedy Jr., among other people Monday.

U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd

U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin says he’s an unabashed supporter of U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., as Barack Obama’s running mate. Meanwhile, Harkin, who ran for the presidency himself in 1992, says “realism” holds that Hillary Clinton has little chance of making the cut for vice presidential candidate as “latent” sexism and racism would give such a ticket perhaps too steep a cultural hill to climb.

Obama, a U.S. senator from Illinois and the Democratic presidential candidate, has yet to make the vice presidential candidate decision, but with the Democratic National Convention starting in a week, the choice is imminent. Harkin elaborated on his pitch for Dodd during an interview with Iowa Independent over the weekend.

“Dodd is my No. 1 pick but I don’t know where it’s going,” Harkin said.

During the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in Des Moines in late 2007, the Iowa Independent noticed the connection between Dodd and Obama and listed Dodd at the top of a running mate ranking story.

Harkin said veteran legislator Dodd knows how to move bills through Congress, which will be important to an Obama administration facing international issues.

“He’s going to need a vice president that can help him get his legislative package through the Congress,” Harkin said. “And I can’t think of anyone who can do it better than Chris Dodd.”

Another big consideration, Harkin said, is that Dodd is well-liked by Republicans and Democrats.

“He knows how to work across party lines as evidenced by the fact that he just got this big foreclosure bill done,” Harkin said.

Harkin said Dodd also would be a major asset for the Obama campaign in the Latino-rich Southwest — a region many analysts believe will be decisive in the presidential race.

“He (Dodd) speaks fluent Spanish,” Harkin said. “The Hispanic community loves him. That would be a great outreach for Barack Obama.”

Dodd developed his Spanish-language skills during a stint in the Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic as a young man. During one campaign stop in Carroll as a presidential candidate last fall, Dodd conducted a video-taped bilingual interview with the Daily Times Herald and La Prensa, a Carroll-based Western Iowa Spanish-language newspaper.

In terms of other candidates thought to be in the Obama veepstakes, Harkin said he strongly doubts U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton will be the vice presidential selection.

“It’s realism,” Harkin said. “I know full well that if Hillary had gotten the nomination she would never have picked Obama, and if he gets it, he’s not going to pick her for a very simple reason: there’s a lot of latent racism and sexism in this country. It’s hard enough for a woman to win. Then if you add an African American on the ticket, or vice versa, if you have an African-American running and you add a woman on, you add racism and sexism together. That’s a pretty steep hill to climb.”