Good News or Just the Clinton Machine Doing Its Thing?

ABCNews notes that the Clinton camp is "pre-spinning" a poor showing in Iowa. Rick Klein has Clinton-supporter and former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack claiming victory for her even if she ends up in third-place:

"She has done what she needed to do here," Vilsack said shortly before a Clinton campaign event in Indianola. "When she started the process she was way behind — it's now by all standards a competitive race."

ABC's Jake Tapper punches all kinds of holes in the claim that Clinton "started way behind", which has been repeated by her campaign chairman today and by Clinton herself this past weekend:

On Sunday, she told George Stephanopoulos on THIS WEEK, "When I started here, I was in single digits. I mean, nobody expected me to be doing as well as I'm doing in Iowa."

[...]

But more factually, as for starting in single digits, her campaign cannot point to one poll in which she was in single digits.

They send as back-up THIS POLL [PDF] taken more than a year ago in which she was polling at 10 percentage points.

But that was long before she "started here."

And while I may not have been a math major, I'm fairly certain "10" is not a single digit.

The Smartest Woman in The World strikes again.

As far as a Clinton loss in Iowa goes, it was my impression that the party super-delegates had all but assured her of the win. As an alternative to spinning defeat, this kind of talk could be an attempt to create a momentum myth. She can pretend that she wasn't benefiting from her national notoriety long before people were trying to figure out how to say Obama's name.

posted by Gabriel Malor at 06:42 PM

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