DUBUQUE, Iowa — “Those guys are evil,” the husband
said, screwing up his face, while his wife frowned but nodded in
agreement. “Anybody who came against them — they were just
destroyed.”
To my conservative ears, it sounded like they were talking about
the Clintons, but these were two hard-core Democrats who had just
attended a Barack Obama town hall on the banks of the Mississippi,
and they were railing against George W. Bush and Karl Rove.
But I couldn’t help myself. “Did you see what Hillary’s campaign
chairman in New Hampshire said?” I asked, breaking my rule of not
suggesting topics or issues to voters.
He winced. At first his wife look confused, but then she
remembered. “Oh, that was ugly,” she said. I was referring
to the AP report that Bill Shaheen, Hillary’s New
Hampshire campaign chairman, had said Obama would be a liability as
the nominee because of “Republican dirty tricks.”
“It’ll be, ‘When was the last time? Did you ever give drugs to
anyone? Did you sell them to anyone?’” Sheehan warned.
This couple (they didn’t want to be named, and so I’ll call them
Mr. and Mrs. Dubuque), were typical of the Democrats I talked to
across the Hawkeye State last week. They were generally happy with
all three of their party’s front runners and determined to beat the
Republicans. Mr. Dubuque had settled on Obama, but his wife was
undecided, between Obama and John Edwards.
They weren’t Clinton haters — both of them liked her Senate
record and would be happy to support her in November — but it was
clear to them Shaheen’s comments, while couched as a fear of
Republican dirty tricks, were a smear, and one typical of Hillary.
The idea that she wasn’t at all behind it was not credible to
them.
Before I brought up Shaheen’s comments, Mrs. Dubuque said she
wouldn’t caucus for Clinton. “Hillary’s more of the same-old,” she
told me. “Everything’s so ugly in Washington. We need a change, and
I don’t think Hillary is it.”
IN DES MOINES at an Edwards event, another undecided Democrat said
Hillary was too harsh, and this was even before Shaheen’s comments
had hit the Internet. “She’s divisive,” he said, “and that’s the
last thing we need right now.”
But, clearly, it wasn’t exactly the divisiveness he
minded. After all, he had just spent an hour heartily cheering
Edwards’s barbs at corporate America, the Bush administration, and
the religious Right.
What so many Iowa Democrats objected to was dirtiness.
To them, the last seven years have been a horrible onslaught of
Machiavellian dirty tricks. Max Cleland was painted as unpatriotic,
John Kerry was swiftboated, John McCain was smeared, Valerie Plame
was knee-capped, and even Dan Rather was framed.
Machiavellian is now a mild slur compared to
Rovian.
And Hillary is more of the same. The Shaheen stunt surprised no
one. That night, Clinton’s lobbyist/senior campaign adviser Mark
Penn went on Hardball, and amid expressing
“disappointment” in Obama’s negativity, went out of his way to
refer to Obama’s “cocaine use.”
As chronicled in the columns of my editor, Bob Novak, Hillary’s
campaign has spent six months warning undecided top Democrats that
they shouldn’t get behind Obama because he has some real black
marks on his past that could come out and sink him. Of course, the
Clinton campaign was too high-minded to drag this dirt into the
public, but they just wanted to save these Democratic operatives
from embarrassment.
ALL OF THIS underhanded mudslinging is hurting Hillary in Iowa far
more than it is hurting Barack. It’s not that Democrats are coming
around to seeing Hillary the same way much of the Right does — Mr.
and Mrs. Dubuque probably don’t think she knocked off Vince Foster.
But they just see her as nasty and dirty. That might not matter
elsewhere, but this is Iowa.
People in the Midwest are nice, and they expect others to be
nice. Remember in 2002, when the national Democratic Party turned
Paul Wellstone’s funeral into a pep rally for Walter Mondale,
Wellstone’s substitute in the Minnesota Senate race? That
backfired, and the Republicans won. The same tactic would have
worked in New York or Washington, D.C., but nastiness doesn’t play
in the heartland.
Beltway Democrats and big city liberals might appreciate
Hillary’s ankle-biting tactics and see them as a virtue, but people
who consider “casserole” a delicacy and say “you betcha” are put
off by dirty politics, even if they share Hillary’s views on most
issues.
Hillary is a strong second place in Iowa polls today, but don’t
be surprised if she finishes third. Iowa Democrats see just a bit
too much of Karl Rove in Hillary Clinton, and that’s enough for
them to go elsewhere.
Timothy P. Carney, senior reporter for the
Evans-Novak Political Report, is a columnist for the
Washington Examiner and author of The Big Ripoff: How Big
Business and Big Government Steal Your Money.
