Redstate

Posted at 3:19am on Nov. 8, 2007 Beginning Of The Fall?

By Pejman Yousefzadeh

There may well be panic afoot in the Clinton campaign at this news:

Senator Hillary Clinton's lead in the first-in-the-nation New Hampshire Primary has fallen to its lowest level of the season.

The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone poll of the state's Likely Primary Voters shows Clinton leading Senator Barack Obama by ten percentage points, 34% to 24%. Former Senator John Edwards attracts 15% of the vote while New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson earns 8%. No other candidate tops the 3% level of support. (see crosstabs)

At 34%, Clinton's current level of support is the lowest measured in any Rasmussen Reports poll this year. Four previous polls in New Hampshire found her consistently in the 37% to 40% range.

This is the first poll of the race conducted since Senator Hillary Clinton's debate gaffe concerning drivers licenses for illegal immigrants. In the last poll before that debate, Clinton held a sixteen-point advantage over Obama. A month earlier, Clinton was ahead by twenty-three percentage points.

The current poll also shows that Clinton's favorability ratings have dropped. Among New Hampshire's Likely Voters, 72% now offer a positive assessment of the frontrunner. That's down from 81% prior to the debate. Obama is viewed favorably by 82%, Edwards by 76%.

Perhaps this is why the counterattacks are getting a little desperate:

Bill Clinton's suggestion that his wife faced a Republican-style "Swift boat" attack during and after the last Democratic debate drew a rebuke yesterday from Senator Barack Obama, who said, "I was pretty stunned by that statement."

The comments by the former president, at a postal workers' convention in Nevada on Monday, came as he discussed efforts by the moderators and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton's Democratic rivals at the debate on Oct. 30 to get Mrs. Clinton to give a quick and clear answer on the issue of driver's licenses for illegal immigrants.

By invoking the so-called "Swift boat" advertisements of the 2004 presidential campaign, Mr. Clinton was calling to mind one of the most divisive episodes of that campaign, when the Democratic nominee, Senator John Kerry, saw his Vietnam War record questioned by a group called the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

"We listened to people make snide comments about whether Vice President Gore was too stiff," Mr. Clinton said, "and when they made dishonest claims about the things that he said that he'd done in his life. When that scandalous Swift boat ad was run against Senator Kerry."

"Why am I saying this?" he continued. "Because I had the feeling that at the end of that last debate we were about to get into cutesy land again."

Mr. Obama, in an interview yesterday with The Associated Press, said the former president was reaching in linking criticism of Mrs. Clinton to the Swift boat advertisements.

"How you would then draw an analogy to distorting somebody's military record is a reach," Mr. Obama said.

To say the least. The Clinton campaign's glass jaw is looking especially fragile these days. No wonder the other Democratic candidates can't resist punching it.

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