Getting prepared to go negative

In the olden days of politics, a candidate could conduct a push poll or try out negative attacks on his or her opponents and no one would be aware of it. A person might tell his friends, "Gee, I got some funny questions in a poll yesterday," but that would be it. But now with the internet, someone receiving such calls can put up a post at a website and soon the story hits the media.

This has happened to Hillary Clinton and her pollsters. Apparently, she's not willing to coast on her nice poll numbers and is getting prepared in case Obama or Edwards breaks out to make a run at her lead. Her pollsters have been trying out some avenues of attack on Obama and Edwards just to be ready.

Hillary Rodham Clinton has publicly disdained going negative on fellow Democrats, but her pollster is apparently probing primary opponents' vulnerabilities in calls to voters in New Hampshire and Iowa.

A field office working for Clinton pollster Mark Penn has been testing Democrats' responses to attacks on John Edwards and Barack Obama, according to three voters who say they received calls in recent weeks.

Iowa voter Jason Eness-Potter told Newsday a pollster called him last month asking if he'd be less or more likely to back Edwards knowing the former senator "proudly promotes himself as a champion of the poor, and yet he went and got a $400 haircut."

Another Democrat told Talking Points Memo, a left-leaning Web site, she had received a similar call.

....The polling worker asked Eness-Porter if he thought Obama should be elected president despite serving only two years in the Senate. "It was a 40-minute interview," said Eness-Porter. "For the first 35 minutes they asked me basic poll questions and then it turned negative."

A Clinton spokesman declined to comment last night.

A New Hampshire-based blogger on the liberal Web site Daily Kos yesterday reported answering a similar poll, this one questioning the sincerity of Obama's opposition to the Iraq War in light of his previous votes to fund troop deployments. Blogger Dave Kulju said the caller also described a recent New York Times story questioning the connection between Edwards' anti-poverty charity and his political campaign.

I'm sure that other candidates are doing the same thing to test out messages to use against their opponents. But they have to be careful in this age of the internet. Remember "forewarned is forearmed."