AT HEARINGS, A CHANCE TO EXPLAIN IRAQ VIEWS AND AUDITION AS COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF (Elisabeth Bumiller, New York Times) The war in Iraq collided with White House ambitions in hearing rooms on Capitol Hill on Tuesday as three would-be commanders in chief — Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain — swooped in from the campaign trail to question the top American commander in Baghdad, Gen. David H. Petraeus. Their tempered performances seemed to reflect the political risks of appearing too easy or tough on General Petraeus in the klieg-light atmosphere of a Washington hearing room halfway through a presidential election. Mr. McCain made a veiled attack on his two Democratic rivals, but only Mrs. Clinton responded. For the most part, the daylong hearings were a fugue of caution as the three struck somber, respectful stances… Although the candidates repeated their main arguments — Mr. McCain said there was significant progress in Iraq; Mrs. Clinton said there was not; Mr. Obama called the war a “massive strategic blunder” — none used the occasion to grandstand.
MORE: Stonewall Petraeus (Fred Kaplan, Slate) Judging from Gen. David Petraeus’ Senate testimony today, our military commitment to Iraq is open-ended and unconditional. The “pause” in troop withdrawals, after the surge brigades go home this July, will not be “brief”—as some officials have hoped—but indefinite. The way that Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker formulated the problem, cutting troops below the current level of 140,000 is not even a conceivable option. They laid out a Catch-22: If things in Iraq get worse, we can’t cut back, lest things get worse still; if things get better, we can’t cut back, lest we risk reversing all our gains.
CLINTON LEADERSHIP A STUDY IN MISSTEPS (Jim VandeHei and David Paul Kuhn, Politico) Clinton has overseen two major staff shake-ups in two months. She has left a trail of unpaid bills and unhappy vendors and had to loan her own campaign $5 million to keep it afloat in January. Her campaign badly underestimated her main adversary, Barack Obama, miscalculated the importance of organizing caucus states and was caught flat-footed after failing to lock up the nomination on Super Tuesday. It would be easy to dismiss all of this as fairly conventional political stumbling — if she hadn’t made her supreme readiness and managerial competence the central issue of her presidential campaign. But since she has, a growing number of Democrats are comparing the Clinton and Obama campaigns — their first real exercise in executive leadership — and rendering harsh assessments of her stewardship.
CLINTONS DISAGREE OVER A FREE-TRADE PACT WITH COLOMBIA (John R. Emshwiller and Bob Davis, Wall Street Journal) Mark Penn, who lost his job as chief strategist to the Clinton campaign because of his work for the Colombian government on a controversial trade pact, wasn’t her only adviser with such ties. Another is Bill Clinton. Mr. Clinton supports the pact with Colombia even though his wife opposes it, a Clinton campaign spokesman said Tuesday. President Bush, who also backs the pact, sent it to Congress Monday to push for its passage. The Clinton campaign spokesman said Mr. Clinton has been supporting trade preferences for Colombia since 2000. Many Democrats oppose the deal… “Like other married couples who disagree on issues from time to time, she disagrees with her husband on this issue,” he said.
POISON PENN (Michelle Cottle, New Republic) By the end, it was hard to count all the reasons the members of Team Hillary wanted to see Mark Penn laid low. The rumpled, portly pollster’s apparently unpardonable sin was his March 31 meeting with the Colombian ambassador to discuss the efforts of Penn’s PR firm, Burson-Marsteller, to procure a trade pact specifically opposed by Senator Clinton. But Penn had been a focus of animus within the Hillary campaign from day one. Famous for his inability to play well with others, Penn is near universally regarded as rough, arrogant, antisocial, controlling, manipulative, brutally ambitious, and occasionally downright abusive–a hurler of cell phones, pagers, and Chinese food… Now, as his public spanking is greeted with hardcore, widespread schadenfreude, the only question being asked about his fall from the Clintons’ grace seems to be, “What took them so long?” The explanations offered by a variety of Hillarylanders, erstwhile Penn colleagues, and party veterans speak as much to the predilections and peculiarities of Bill and Hillary as to any particular talents Penn himself possesses.
MORE: Clinton Adviser Remains a Flash Point as Unions Pounce (Lorraine Woellert, Bloomberg) As Clinton rival Barack Obama and his trade-union allies use Penn’s business associations to stoke support among voters going into the April 22 Pennsylvania primary, Penn still participates in campaign strategy calls, conducts polling, dispenses advice and manages Clinton’s direct-mail operation. The situation has caused tension within Clinton’s camp, which said on April 6 that veteran pollster Geoff Garin and Communications Director Howard Wolfson would take over the strategic reins.
SUPERDELEGATES PRESSURED TO BACK OBAMA (Associated Press) Eager to stop intraparty fighting, dozens of local Democratic Party leaders are urging Virginia’s superdelegates to unite around Barack Obama for president. The petition was intended to push the state’s uncommitted delegates into forsaking Hillary Clinton in her nomination battle with Obama. It was signed by 36 local party chairmen, some of them from Virginia’s largest localities, and five congressional district party chairs. Most of the signers, but not all, endorsed Obama, said Arlington Chairman Peter Rousselot, one of the architects of the petition. There was no evidence Tuesday that the tactic was working, even on a superdelegate who endorsed Clinton but has wavered for weeks… Across the nation, candidates are ardently pursuing uncommitted superdelegates and, in some cases, urging committed ones to switch. Virginia is the first state in which local chairmen petitioned superdelegates to switch to Obama, according to Clinton’s campaign.
THE GOSPEL, ACCORDING TO LUKE (Eli Saslow, Washington Post) At 28, the youngest big-city mayor in modern U.S. history has become one of Clinton’s key backers in Pennsylvania, her top surrogate in its second-largest city and an effective rejoinder to the idea that Sen. Barack Obama, her rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, has a lock on young voters in the state.
MCCAIN RAISED $15 MILLION IN MARCH BUT STILL LAGS BEHIND RIVALS (Mary Jacoby and T.W. Farnam, Wall Street Journal) Sen. McCain’s March total compares with the $11.6 million he raised in February and $11.8 million in January, reflecting the time he has spent at high-dollar fund-raisers around the country. But he is being vastly out-raised by his Democratic rivals, underscoring the Arizonan’s larger problems motivating the Republican base. Democratic Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois raised $40 million in March, and his rival for the Democratic nomination, Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York, raised $20 million… Nonetheless, the McCain campaign said it is actively recruiting donors every day.
