Clinton, Obama foreign policy advisers get heated
Watch Rice and Rubin debate foreign policy issues on Late Edition.
(CNN) - While the overall tone between campaign surrogates was tranquil on the Sunday morning talk shows, the argument between foreign policy advisers was anything but calm.
Sparked by Hillary Clinton's quote from earlier this week in which she said that "we will attack Iran" and that the U.S. would be able to "totally obliterate" Iraq's controversial neighbor, two Democratic foreign policy experts passionately defended their candidate's positions on CNN's "Late Edition."
Barack Obama adviser Susan Rice and Clinton adviser Jamie Rubin, both former members of the Clinton administration, came into the interview well-researched and armed with criticism of the opposing candidate. Rubin repeatedly cited a New Yorker article from 2006 in which Obama said he did not know how he would have voted on the war had he been in the senate, while Rice maintained that Obama had always felt that the war was a mistake.
Neither surrogate would accept the other's claims. It got pretty heated.
Sunday Roundup: Who's leading the Democratic race?
(CNN) - Hillary Clinton's big win in Pennsylvania on Tuesday kept the New York senator's hopes alive as she and fellow candidate Sen. Barack Obama continue to campaign for the next two upcoming primaries in Indiana and North Carolina. With both campaigns still in full swing and no immediate end in sight, the Sunday morning talk shows hashed out the current stats with strategists, surrogates, party leaders, and even one of the candidates, in an effort to answer the question: Who's leading the race for the Democratic nomination?
Indiana Senator Evan Bayh, a backer of Sen. Hillary Clinton, and former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, a supporter of Sen. Barack Obama, stopped by ABC's "This Week" to talk campaign politics. Sen. Bayh made the case for looking at the popular vote instead of the delegate count to determine a frontrunner. "The most important thing to look at is the aggregate popular vote. The pledged delegates are important, but they are just intermediaries representing the people themselves," he said. But Daschle argued that examining only the popular vote leaves out a large segment of the Democratic voting population, the caucuses. "That basically says to all caucus states who don't keep track of the popular vote per se that you don't count," Daschle said.
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It was a Senator showdown on CNN's "Late Edition" this week between Clinton supporter Sen. Charles Schumer (D-New York) and Obama backer Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Missouri). Sen. Schumer interpreted Clinton's Pennsylvania win as a change in the tide. "Hillary Clinton now has the momentum," he said to CNN's Wolf Blitzer. But Sen. McCaskill disputed Schumer's assertions. "If you drill down and look at the superdelegate race, right now, you see where the momentum is," referring to Obama's surge in superdelegates in the past week despite his loss in Pennsylvania.
In ad wars, Obama spends more but Clinton sets tempo
[cnn-photo-caption image= http://i.l.cnn.net/cnn/2008/POLITICS/04/27/ad.buys/art.clintonad.cnn.jpg caption="A Clinton ad on the economy mirrors a spot that aired in March."]
WASHINGTON (CNN) - When it comes to campaign commercials, Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are going where no candidate has gone before.
Obama and Clinton have spent a combined $110 million on TV ads to this point; we've had a race that's literally gone on since last summer for ad spending," said Evan Tracey of TNS Media Intelligence/Campaign Media Analysis Group, CNN's consultants on campaign commercials.
"We're beyond what has been record spending in previous presidential nomination campaigns. John Kerry spent close to $20 million to get the nomination four years ago. Barack Obama's already approaching $70 million."
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