Presidential diary: Obama and Clinton spar, as Edwards laments

• SEIU will not endorse in the Democratic primary
  

One of the most coveted union endorsements will benefit no one, as the SEIU has announced it will endorse any candidate. The SEIU specified that local unions were now free to issue endorsements on a state-by-state basis.

This is a major blow for John Edwards, who had positioned himself as labor's candidate since the start of the cycle. Edwards was favored to get the SEIU's nomination, but that was before Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton launched an all-out effort to prevent that from happening. The two senators knew they probably could not build up enough support to wrestle the endorsement away from Edwards, but they hoped they could get enough support to prevent him from obtaining the necessary majority. In September, the SEIU announced it was postponing its decision -- and finally decided to keep out of the primary today. Edwards will now attempt to get state-by-state endorsements by SEIU local branches.

Today's news is also probably a reflection on Edwards's diminished chances. The SEIU does not want to endorse a candidate who does not appear likely to win the nomination. Look at how many obituaries of unions' political influence whttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifere written in 2004 after Dean's collapse. While Edwards is by no means out of the nomination race, he does appear increasingly weak. A new poll out of North Carolina today has him trailing Clinton in his home-state!

• Clinton attacked for her Iran vote

Two weeks after John Edwards used very similar rhetoric in the Dartmouth debate, Barack Obama is using Clinton's vote on the resolution making Iran's Revolutionary Guard a terrorist group to portray her as Bush-lite and eager to repeat the mistakes of the past:

Senator Clinton obviously in 2002 voted to authorize the war in Iran. And her willingness to once again extend to the president the benefit of the doubt I think indicates that she hasn't fully learned some of the lessons that we saw back in 2002.

In Dartmouth, Edwards had compared the lessons he had learned from the Iraq vote in 2002 to the ones Clinton had learned, as revealed by this vote on Iran: "What I learned in my vote on Iraq was you cannot give this president the authority and you can't even give him the first step in that authority because he cannot be trusted." This criticism is more than fair. Senator Webb led a valiant opposition to this bill, and many Democrats had no problem opposing it. That Hillary Clinton is willing to vote for such proposals while in a contested Democratic primary does not augur well for what she will say in the general election.

Yet, Obama's credibility was greatly damaged by reports that he himself co-sponsored a bill on April 24, 2007 also making this guard a terrorist group! To defend himself, Obama is arguing that what he is objecting to is not that this characterization, but other portions of the bill that link Iran to Iraq. This seems to be a fishy explanation: If calling part of the Iranian state terrorist is not a way to prepare an attack, than what is? Also hurting Obama's credibility is that he himself did not take part in the vote two weeks ago...