Obama Draws Clinton's Ire Over Early Ambition

With a new poll showing that Senator Obama of Illinois may be overtaking Senator Clinton in the early presidential caucus state of Iowa, Mrs. Clinton's camp is taking the unusual step of reaching all the way back to Mr. Obama's kindergarten days to find evidence of his duplicity about how long he has had designs on the White House.

Aides to Mrs. Clinton lashed out at Mr. Obama's claim, which he repeated yesterday, that he only recently decided to mount a presidential bid.

"I have not been planning to run for president for however number of years some of the other candidates have been planning for," Mr. Obama said at a news conference in Iowa. The Illinois senator has previously alluded to a disputed allegation in a book by Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr. that Mrs. Clinton and President Clinton made a plan before he took office that she would also seek the presidency.

Mrs. Clinton's team responded with an opposition research compilation pointing to news reports that Mr. Obama has expressed an interest in the presidency over the years, including as far back as third grade and even kindergarten. "Senator Obama's comment today is fundamentally at odds with what his teachers, family, classmates, and staff have said about his plans to run for president. Senator Obama's campaign rhetoric is getting in the way of his reality," a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, Phil Singer, said in the release, which was also posted on a Web site run by her campaign, www.hillaryhub.com.

"It's all too petty," a professor of politics at the University of Virginia, Larry Sabato, said of the exchange over who first harbored dreams of the presidency. "It shows you how little they have to talk about. There's not much of a difference between them on the issues."

Mr. Sabato said the Clinton campaign's attack seemed more like a send-up from the news satire site "The Onion" than a serious political statement. "Nobody cares in the slightest," he said. "I've had easily 1,000 students tell me they're going to be president."

A spokeswoman for Mr. Obama, Jennifer Psaki, ridiculed the Clinton camp's tactics. "I'm sure tomorrow they'll attack him for being a flip-flopper because he told his second-grade teacher he wanted to be an astronaut," she said.

The missive from Mrs. Clinton's operation omitted an interesting, and arguably germane, part of the anecdotes from Mr. Obama's childhood. Although Mr. Obama was born in Hawaii, when he was in kindergarten and third grade, he lived in Indonesia. It is not clear, therefore, whether the young Mr. Obama was aspiring to be president of Indonesia, America, or the whole world for that matter.

In March, the Chicago Tribune reported that Mr. Obama's third-grade teacher, Fermina Katarina Sinaga, said the future senator "wrote he wanted to be president" in response to an assignment about what he wanted to be when he grew up. The Clinton research sheet picks up that part of the story but ignores the quote that comes next. "He didn't say what country he wanted to be president of. But he wanted to make everybody happy," Ms. Sinaga said. The similar kindergarten anecdote, which comes from an Associated Press dispatch, has no indication of what country Mr. Obama hoped to lead.

Mrs. Clinton's campaign may have decided to gloss over those ambiguities to avoid suggestions that she was challenging his loyalty or echoing apocryphal claims from some on the right that Mr. Obama attended a school that taught militant Islam or that he is secretly Muslim.

Yesterday may not have been the first time the Clinton campaign seized on the report about Mr. Obama's kindergarten dreams. A Web logger for Time magazine, Ana Marie Cox, reported on November 11 that "a little birdie" had urged her to fact-check the Illinois senator's claims against his kindergarten record.

She did not indicate whether the tip came from Mrs. Clinton's campaign, but many who posted comments online assumed that was the source.

The on-the-record attack from the Clinton camp came on the same day a new Iowa poll showed that she may be slipping into second place there. In the Des Moines Register survey, she had 25% support, Mr. Obama had 28% backing, and a former senator from North Carolina, John Edwards, had 23%. The poll's sampling error was plus or minus 4.4%.

Mr. Sabato said some Iowa voters are turning away from Mrs. Clinton because they are concerned that a win for her in the state might give her unstoppable momentum, since she holds a lead over Mr. Obama in most polls from other early-voting states. "If she wins, the whole thing is over on night one, which is partly why this is happening," the professor said. "They know that by giving the plurality to Hillary Clinton they will have shut down this contest."