Clinton's new slogan: We ALREADY HAVE beat Giuliani once - Political Forum

Sebelius for VP, not Hillary · #1 (**permalink**) 10-19-2007, 02:37 AM

From Politico.com:

Quote:

Penn says Clinton already beat Giuliani
By: Ben Smith
Oct 18, 2007 12:29 PM EST
Updated: October 18, 2007 07:48 PM EST

Rudy Giuliani's central argument to Republicans is that he's the only man who can beat Hillary Clinton. But Clinton's chief strategist shot back Thursday that Clinton can beat Giuliani — and that, in fact, she already has.

"We started in New York about seven or eight [percentage points] behind; when he dropped out we were seven or eight ahead," Mark Penn said, referring to — and perhaps overstating — polls from Clinton's 2000 Senate race against Giuliani. "We have gone through a cycle with Giuliani."

In a hint of the Clinton campaign’s possible line of attack against Giuliani in a general election contest, Penn also said Giuliani's weakness will be with female voters. "There's only so much tough-guy vote in the Republican Party," he said. His language echoes past descriptions Clinton’s campaigns have used to characterize male challengers as hostile and menacing — and thus unappealing to female voters.

Penn said his internal polling shows that as many as 24 percent of Republican women would support Clinton in a general election "because of the emotional element of having a woman nominee."

Giuliani and Clinton were to face off in November 2000 in a high-profile, combative Senate race before Giuliani dropped out, citing his recent prostate cancer diagnosis. Many on each side of that contest remain convinced that their candidate would have won the race, which devolved into a face-off between Clinton and a little-known, overmatched Long Island congressman, Rick Lazio.

In fact, public polling shows that Giuliani — who began the race as the front-runner in some polls and in the public perception — had lost his lead before he dropped out of the race on May 19 in 2000. However, only a few polls showed a Clinton lead, and the race was viewed as a dead heat when Giuliani dropped out. "Dispatching her top strategist to make revisionist claims in an effort to convince the Democratic base Hillary can beat Rudy in the general election sounds a bit like campaign jitters to me," Giuliani's communications director, Katie Levinson, said of Penn's remarks.

Quinnipiac University, which polls widely in New York State races, found the Senate race tied in the fall of 1999, and then saw Giuliani open up a lead in the spring of 2000. A March 2 poll found Giuliani with a seven-point lead. An April 5 poll gave Clinton a three-point lead. The candidates remained tied in May, with Giuliani's April 27 announcement that he had cancer — but that he planned to stay in the race — producing "no noticeable shift," according to Quinnipiac.

"Hillary and Rudy were virtually deadlocked in the couple of months before his withdrawal from the race according to the publicly available polls," said Doug Muzzio, a professor of public affairs at Baruch College in New York. "The private polling data available to Penn may have suggested a Clinton overall lead and advantages among subgroups that didn't show up in other polls. But from what we know, Penn's claim doesn't wash," Muzzio said.

A media strategist for Giuliani's 2000 race, Rick Wilson, mocked Penn's claims about that contest. "Rudy had a terrific political operation in place, was raising a record amount of money and would have beaten Mrs. Clinton because he had the fundamental advantage of having a real record — in addition to being a real New Yorker, a real leader and a real Yankee fan," he said. "Perhaps Mark was thinking of sacrificial lamb Rick Lazio, and not Rudy."

However, the gist of Penn's remarks — that Clinton had effectively challenged Giuliani's widely perceived advantage, and taken the momentum in the race, matches the perception in the press and among political observers in New York.

"Hillary probably would have won," said Jerry Skurnik, a Democratic New York political consultant, who noted that Giuliani's illness came during a disastrous political spring for the mayor, which included a police shooting he was widely viewed as mishandling by attacking the victim, Patrick Dorismond, as "no altar boy." It emerged that Dorismond had, in fact, been an altar boy.

Several parts of this article actually shoot down Clinton's argument:

Quote:

However, only a few polls showed a Clinton lead, and the race was viewed as a dead heat when Giuliani dropped out... The candidates remained tied in May, with Giuliani's April 27 announcement that he had cancer — but that he planned to stay in the race — producing "no noticeable shift," according to Quinnipiac.

I guess that this new claim should be viewed with skepticism then.