Edwards goes on the offensive

The Edwards campaign is going on a major attack against Hillary Clinton. Playing on Clinton's "let's have lunch" program in which a few small donors will be randomly selected to have lunch with the senator, Joe Trippi just blasted Hillary in an e-mail titlted "Guess Who's Really Coming to Lunch with Hillary?"

Dear Friend,

If you want to know why we need change in Washington—and I mean real change, not just trading corporate Republican insiders with corporate Democratic insiders—then just look at Senator Clinton's schedule for today.

Today at noon, Hillary Clinton will be hosting a fundraiser in Washington, D.C. for a select group of lobbyists with an interest in homeland security.

Tickets for the Clinton fundraiser are $1,000 a ticket and $25,000 per bundler. And for that money you get more than a meal—you get to attend one-hour breakout sessions in four different areas of homeland security that will include House Committee Chairs and members of Congress who sit on the very committees that will be voting on homeland security legislation.

The American people know that the system in Washington has become corroded and corrupt—that the nation's capital is awash in campaign money from lobbyists seeking to gain influence to impact legislation.

Yet too many in office have fallen under the spell of campaign money at any cost—and do not see that when they defend the system, they are protecting those that have rigged the game that puts corporate profits ahead of the interests of working Americans...

Today's Clinton fundraising event is a "poster child" for what is wrong with Washington and what should never happen again with a candidate running for the highest office in the land.

That no one in the Clinton campaign—including the candidate—found anything wrong with holding this fundraiser is an indication of just how bad things have gotten in Washington—because there isn't an American outside of Washington who would not be sickened by it.

Edwards has been seeking to make Clinton's ties to lobbyists a major theme of his campaign, painting her as an inside-the-Beltway establishment politician too corrupted to bring actual change. He also is probably seeing the current Hsu scandal of a Clinton donor arrested on corruption charges as an opening to press his points and present himself as the true outsider who can reform the system.

But the usual problems arise with Edwards's strategy:

1. This criticism is definitely fair. Clinton (and her husband) has been too cozy with interest groups, and her defense of lobbyists at the YearlyKos convention was very naive. But a question has dogged the Edwards campaign from the start: Is he the right person to deliver this message? Does he not have too many ties to Washington interests, hedge funds or problematic donors himself?
   
2. Furthermore, Obama has also been pressing the change mantle, and perhaps with more success. He is introducing himself also as an outsider who has only been in Washington for a little while and who would not rely on traditional lobbies and powerful interests. (Obama told a crowd of Wall Street investors yesterday: "If we are honest, I think we must admit that those who have benefited from the new global marketplace — and that includes almost everyone in this room — have not always concerned themselves with the losers in this new economy.") But Obama has his own weaknesses when it comes to this, mainly that the outsider image he has carefully cultivated is also mostly a myth. And with people like Kuchinich and Gravel in the race, it is hard for Obama and Edwards to appear as clean as they are trying to. At the very least for Clinton, Obama and Edwards making the same argument divides the vote of those looking for ethically clean candidates.
   
3. Edwards was successful in 2004 as the sunny optimistic candidate. And Iowa traditionally shuns negative campaigns (which is a big reason for Gephardt's and Dean's destruction in the 2004 caucuses). Edwards's main aim is Iowa, so is this strategy going to hurt him? And do Iowa caucus-goers care as much about Clinton's lobbyist ties as, say, independent voters in New Hampshire?