Here’s a post, in its entirety from Ben Smith’s blog at The Politico …
Spin from the spin room
Edwards aide Jonathan Prince: “Tonight change won, and the status quo lost it.”
Obama aide Robert Gibbs: “It’s the Clinton argument from 1992, change versus more of the same. Only she’s on the other side.”
Clinton aide Ann Lewis: “Presidents don’t get to vote present.”
Also, a minor slip by Mark Penn, defending himself against anonymous snipers:
The same quotes, he said, “appeared in the paper in 1996 as well, and I helped get President Bush into a successful second term.”
He meant Clinton.
The rip at Mark Penn at the end is fun. But that’s not why I’m reprinting it. At the top we have spin lines from each of the campaigns coming off Saturday night’s debate. Now, these are lines Smith picked out as capturing the essence of the spin. So I guess I should leave open the possibility that the campaigns themselves would have chosen a different foot to put forward.
But if we take this on its face it’s a good, telling sign of how dire a situation the Clinton camp may be in.
Edwards’ message is clear and in line with his strategy of setting up a ‘change’ mano a mano with Obama. Same with Obama’s. You can agree with them or disagree with them. But anyone will understand immediately what they mean.
And then Ann Lewis: “Presidents don’t get to vote present.”
Now, I’m confident that the vast majority of people, even a lot of politically aware people, would not have any idea what Lewis was even talking about, let alone whether they agreed with it or whether it would sway their vote.
If you’re interested, the reference is to an issue discussed in this article in the New York Times a couple weeks ago — the number of times Obama voted “present” while serving in the Illinois legislature. As it happens, it seems to be at least a fairly bogus issue. As the Times explains, he did so “nearly 130 times,” though virtually all of those votes seemed to be cases where a “present” vote would be unremarkable in the context of the way the Illinois legislature works.
But my point is not to get into the merits of this ‘voting present’ issue. Read the article and make your own judgment.
My point is that this issue scarcely rises to the level of inside baseball. Hillary is in a five day fight for her political life. And the best one of her chief message gurus can come up with is an obscure jab that wouldn’t even be that cutting if people had any idea what she was talking about?
One could make the argument that Lewis’s audience here wasn’t voters but political reporters. And she was trying to plant the seed of their counterattack on Obama. But it all amounts to the same thing. These folks have been knocked senseless by the events of the last three days. And they seem almost incapable of even thinking straight. Through the day I got pitched, formally and informally, by various Clintonites on Obama stories, most of which were almost embarrassing to hear.
I don’t use these words and phrases lightly or indiscriminately. I find it difficult to conceive of how unprepared her team was for this not-that-hard-to-predict turn of events.
What it tells me is that they never really planned for this. And they literally have no idea what to do at the clutch moment. For the now they are grasping for anything and everything.
