As the negative reviews came pouring in for Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton of New York from the debate Tuesday night, her campaign kicked it into overdrive to argue that it was instead just piling on by her rivals since she had a commanding lead in the polls.
 
Clinton’s campaign put together a series of clips of her competitors for the Democratic nomination saying her name over and over and over again from during the debate last night.  The note attached said that the rivals were switching to negative campaigning away from pledges of positive campaigning.

Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois and former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, who have been running second and third in the nomination hunt respectively, also quickly put up clips of their performances.

The question is: who performed the best and worst?

Yes, he really did say he saw an unidentified flying object.
 
Democratic presidential long-shot Rep. Dennis Kucinich claimed at Tuesday night’s debate he did indeed see a UFO when he was at the house of actress and close friend Shirley MacLaine in Graham, Washington.
 
MacLaine described the sighting in a book to be published in November, “Sage-ing While Age-Ing.” 
 
“It was an unidentified flying object, OK? It’s, like, it’s unidentified. I saw something,” Kucinich said in response to a, shall we say, skeptical question from NBC News’ debate moderator Tim Russert.
 
“And also, you have to keep in mind that more — that Jimmy Carter saw a UFO and also that more people in this country have seen UFOs than I think approve of George Bush’s presidency,” the Ohio congressman said.
 
To which Russert responded, 14 percent of Americans have said they have seen a UFO. So Kucinich’s math was a little off, Bush’s approval rating is in the 30s.
 
Tongue firmly in cheek, Kucinich said he would move his campaign headquarters to Roswell, New Mexico, the location where some believe a UFO crashed in 1947. The U.S. military has repeatedly argued that it was a weather balloon.
 
No word yet on Kucinich’s detailed plan for space exploration but we’re waiting … and watching…

Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards, who has been stuck in third place in national polls, picked up a key endorsement late Tuesday from the Service Employees International Union local in the early primary voting state of New Hampshire.
 
The former North Carolina senator already received the endorsements from SEIU locals in 11 other states including the other major early primary state of Iowa as well as the big union states of Michigan and California.
 
First reported by NBC News’ First Read, the backing by the State Employees’ Association (SEIU local 1984) will provide Edwards more muscle to try to win supporters in New Hampshire as he tries to close the nearly 30-point gap between he and front runner Sen. Hillary Clinton there.

“John Edwards’ commitment to guaranteeing universal health care, the work he has done standing shoulder-to-shoulder with organized labor and his strength as the candidate who can win the general election next year and bring a pro-union, pro-working family agenda to the White House have earned him this critical support in New Hampshire,” Edwards’ New Hampshire state director Beth Leonard said in a statement posted on his Web site.

Photo credit: Reuters/Brian Snyder (Edwards files for the New Hampshire primary on Monday.)

While most of the Democratic presidential hopefuls were beating up on front runner Sen. Hillary Clinton during their debate on Tuesday in Philadelphia, Sen. Joseph Biden broke from the pack and took aim at the Republican leading candidate Rudy Giuliani. 

When asked whether he stood by his recent comments that his experience was “considerably deeper” and “more relevant” than that of Sen. Clinton’s, Biden did not take the bait. 

 ”I’m not running against Hillary Clinton. I’m running to lead the free world. I’m running to lead this country. And the irony is Rudy Giuliani is probably the most underqualified man since George Bush to seek the presidency,” Biden said.

And then Biden, who has largely polled in the single digits, was on a roll giving his take on the qualifications of the former New York mayor.

“Rudy Giuliani, I mean think about it, Rudy Giuliani. There’s only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun and a verb and 9/11. I mean there’s nothing else. He is genuinely not qualified to be president,” Biden said, drawing one of the few audible reactions from the debate audience at Drexel University.

“This man is truly not qualified to be president. I’m looking forward to running against Rudy Giuliani.” (In contrast, Republican presidential candidates have mostly only mentioned Clinton during their debates.)

Giuliani’s campaign communications director Katie Levinson shot back that it was instead Biden who had no experience running anything.

“Wait, I take that back, Sen. Biden has never run anything but his mouth,” she said, a reference to several verbal miscues the Delaware senator has made.

Photo credit: Reuters/Larry Downing

Talk about trying to turn a negative into a positive.
 
Republican presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani launched a new radio advertisement this week touting his health care plan and cited his battle with prostate cancer as an example of why the private U.S. health care system is best. 

Giuliani, who passed on a U.S. Senate race in 2000 against Hillary Clinton (now a possible opponent in 2008 election) while he fought the cancer, pointed out in the ad that if he had been in Britain the survival rate is only 44 percent for prostate cancer because the government runs the health care system there.
 
However, Democratic-leaning bloggers and others have argued that the number is inaccurate and the survival rate is much higher. Giuliani got the number from an article in the City Journal this summer by David Gratzer, “The Ugly Truth About Canadian Health Care,” his campaign said.
 
The British Office of National Statistics says the most recent available five-year survival rate for prostate cancer there was 74.4 percent. 
 
The U.S. five-year survival rate is almost 100 percent for those men who have prostate cancer that has not spread far in the body, according to the American Cancer Society. The 10-year survival rate is 93 percent, it found.
 
Giuliani spokeswoman Maria Comella said the former New York mayor was reading the City Journal piece and decided to use the statistic in remarks at a campaign stop which were later used for the ad. She did not back away from the number and also noted other studies show that Americans are better off in the U.S. health care system than Europeans are in their systems.
 
“A system of choice is going to provide better quality and more affordable health care than a government mandated system,” she said. 

It’s not every day you see Democratic presidential hopefuls Barack Obama and John Edwards on the front-runner Hillary Clinton’s Web site.
 
But that’s what her campaign has done, putting up videos of Obama from earlier this year and one from Edwards in 2004 when they spoke of the virtues of positive campaigning.
 
The idea is to contrast their positive comments then with their negative remarks now about Clinton, given that she has a large lead over them in national polls.
    
Obama and Edwards are now more directly challenging Clinton as a way to gain ground since they have trailed her for much of the year.
    
Beneath the videos, Clinton’s campaign included links to news articles from the past couple days about Obama and Edwards shifting their tactics. Typically, Clinton rarely if ever mentions the two by name while on the campaign trail and mostly just responds to issues raised by Obama.
    
Obama last weekend argued in Iowa that Clinton had been dodging questions about how to strengthen the Social Security retirement program and her campaign quickly responded by putting up a television advertisement in Iowa and New Hampshire detailing her record on Social Security.

The Obama campaign declined to comment but Edwards spokeswoman Colleen Murray offered a rebuttal.

“In 2008 John Edwards is saying if you are looking for the candidate who will defend a corrupt, broken system in Washington while 47 million Americans go without health care and 37 million Americans live in poverty, then he’s not your guy,” she said.

Let’s see if they mix it up more tonight at the Democratic debate in Philadelphia.

The New York Daily News reported this morning that Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama turned down an offer to help his campaign from Hollywood heartthrob Brad Pitt — well at least through intermediaries anyway.

So far neither Pitt nor his girlfriend and actress Angelina Jolie have donated to a presidential candidate this year, according to campaign records.

The Daily News cited a “knowledgeable source” who said the Obama campaign did not want to be seen as too close to Hollywood. Obama has received a $2,300 contribution from fellow Ocean’s 11 co-star George Clooney.

But Obama spokeswoman Jen Psaki said that wasn’t the case.

“If Brad Pitt wants to campaign for Obama, the only challenge will be deciding who staffs him,” she said.

Yeah, and then there’s the fight in our newsroom over who gets to cover the event…

Is Barack Obama’s wife Michelle too hot for Hollywood? That is what the Democratic presidential candidate said on Monday.

At a question-and-answer session sponsored in front of a college-age audience in Cedar Rapids, a student asked Obama what a hypothetical movie about his life should be called and who would play the lead characters.

Obama had no problem coming up with a title: “The Audacity of Hope,” named after his 2006 book.

But the casting proved a little trickier.

“Will Smith’s a possibility because his ears match mine,” the jug-eared candidate said, drawing a chuckle from the crowd.

“In terms of my wife, there’s no one that good looking, so she’ll have to play herself.”

Long-shot Democratic White House contender Chris Dodd broke new ground by becoming the first presidential hopeful to announce plans to vote against confirming President George W. Bush’s nomination of Michael Mukasey to be U.S. attorney general.
 
In a conference call with reporters on Monday, Dodd voiced outrage at what he described as Mukasey’s excessively broad view of presidential powers — and accused the retired judge of failing to understand “we are a nation of laws, not men.”
 
At his Senate confirmation hearing earlier this month, Mukasey was asked whether the president is required to obey federal statutes.
 
Mukasey replied: “That would have to depend on whether what goes on outside the statute nonetheless lies with the authority of the president to defend the country.”
 
Dodd said to suggest that the president is above the law “is a very, very troubling statement and more or less a continuation of the Alberto Gonzales’ mentality at the Justice Department, which many people found troubling.”

Dodd said he plans to raise the issue at Tuesday’s debate in Philadelphia by Democratic presidential candidates.
 
Mukasey is expected to provide answers this week to written questions from members of the Judiciary Committee on a number of matters, including presidential powers and if he believes the widely denounced interrogation technique known as waterboarding constitutes torture.
 
Sen. John McCain of Arizona, a Republican White House contender and former prisoner of war in Vietnam, said on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday that waterboarding, simulated drowning, is clearly torture, McCain said he’s anxiouis to hear if Mukasey agrees. 

– Reporting by Thomas Ferraro

– Photo credit: Neal Hamberg (Dodd in New Hampshire last month)

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who has led neighboring New Hampshire polls for the Republican presidential nomination, chalked up a key endorsement in the early primary voting state: its senior U.S. senator Judd Gregg.
 
The Romney campaign said Gregg, who is in his third Senate term and previously served as the state’s governor for two terms (before Romney was governor of Massachusetts), would campaign alongside him in the coming weeks and months.
 
“Mitt Romney embodies New Hampshire’s values — values that stress government living within its means, lower taxes, a stronger military and stronger families,” Gregg said in a statement provided by the Romney campaign.
 
Gregg serves as the ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee and also is a senior member of the Senate Appropriations Committee.
 
One of Gregg’s strategists, Tom Rath, has been working with the Romney group for more than a year.

Photo credit: Neal Hamberg (Romney campaigning in New Hampshire last month)