This girl is 10. (Via Clive Davis.)

Remember when Obama’s campaign was being lauded for being so open to the press, while Hillary’s was being pilloried for being controlling and cold? Here’s the Daily Telegraph’s Toby Harnden describing Obama staffers in Iowa last week:

Senior aides chatting away to big shot and small fry reporters alike. Credentials and access to as many reporters and members of the public who wanted it. Throughout the Iowa campaign, Obama volunteers would thank us for coming, accompany us to the correct entrance if we asked the way. Clinton staffers treated us as an inconvenience at best and at worst like a bad smell.

Not so in New Hampshire, this week, according to a couple of outlets. Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly had a good whinge in the New York Post today:

At a [New Hampshire] campaign rally for Barack Obama, a staffer attempted to block a Fox News camera from photographing the senator. This was a blatant assault on press freedom, and I had to remove the man from in front of the camera.

Meanwhile, that other well known, right-wing media outlet, The Guardian, goes further in a video accusing the Obama campaign of paranoia and trying to exert too much control.

It’s been a thoroughly enjoyable week of American politics watching the pendulum swing between Obama and Clinton. But whichever candidate wins the Democratic nomination, you’ve got to fancy their chances against what is, at best, a mediocre Republican field.

If the telegenic Mitt Romney started out a strong contender, campaigning on his entrepreneurial strengths and his newfound opposition to abortion, he has progressively looked duller and duller. Nowadays he most resembles a second-rate Republican version of John Kerry, flip flops and all.

Rudy Giuliani, the lisping, thrice-married 9/11 candidate, doesn’t appear to be doing much better. His stunning non-campaign, that relies on hitting the big states in the late stages, hasn’t even started to build momentum. And how can a 9/11 candidate stand a chance of broad appeal when even firefighters oppose him precisely because of his actions on 9/11?

At least John McCain offers a sliver of bi-partisan appeal. He has a decent track record of speaking out against torture and of pushing through campaign finance reform. But McCain always looks as though he’s one step away from a heart attack. And who’s going to vote for grandpa in the 21st century?

Which leaves cuddly Mike Huckabee, a cross between Alan Titchmarsh and those guys you see on Slimfast commercials boasting about how they lost 45 lbs in only four weeks. Sure, lovable Mike appeals to the everyday Joe who’s struggling to pay the mortgage and put the kids through school. But he also comes across as a bit of a wimp, the little boy who had his lunch money stolen and got teased for being fat. The Politics of Fear might be on the retreat but they still linger in the background. And how many Americans would want a Mike Huckabee in charge if Iranian boats really were to take a pot shot at an American warship, or worse?

Both Obama and Clinton look equal to the task, fully capable of striding into the White House and shaking the place up a bit. They are running awesome campaigns and they both have a huge groundswell of support behind them. Right now, it looks as though the main choice facing Americans is, do they want an idealist like Obama in charge or a realist like Clinton?

First posted at anorak.co.uk.

UPDATE:: Sod’s law, eh. You write about four candidates and number five, Fred Thompson, pulls off an impressive show tonight in the South Carolina debate. I’m not sure Mike Huckabee quite knows what hit him from the Fred camp this evening.

Rudy Giuliani’s rotten judgment in hiring his former driver Bernie Kerik to be New York police commissioner is well known. But a damning profile of the former mayor in last week’s New Yorker highlights other similar errors:

Many, perhaps most, politicians probably value competence and probity somewhat less than devotion. What’s unusual about Giuliani is how little effort he makes to disguise this. Take, for example, the story of his Taxi and Limousine commissioner Christopher Lynn, which Giuliani invokes in the chapter [of his book Leadership] titled “Loyalty: The Vital Virtue.” One day, Lynn, because his boyfriend had complained to him about a cabdriver’s behavior, personally suspended the driver’s taxi license. His action—and his subsequent insistence that he had not violated the commission’s rules when evidently he had—became a running story in the News, prompting several aides to advise Giuliani to get rid of Lynn. Instead, the Mayor promoted him to transportation commissioner: “I wasn’t going to let any newspaper choose my administration.” (In his new job, Lynn made more news, for a variety of additional scandalettes, and in 2000 he was forced to withdraw his name from consideration as the District of Columbia’s taxicab chief.) In the same chapter, Giuliani explains how he picked Robert Harding to be the city’s budget director. Harding’s father, Raymond, the longtime chairman of the New York State Liberal Party, had secured for Giuliani the Liberal Party ballot line, which he ran on three times. Giuliani writes that he “knew there’d be heat” for what could appear to be a patronage hire. But, he goes on, “I wasn’t going to choose a lesser candidate simply to quiet critics.” This self-praise is particularly noteworthy, since Giuliani also appointed a second Harding son, Russell, to lead the New York City Housing Development Corporation. Russell, a college dropout with no experience in the housing field, embezzled more than four hundred thousand dollars from the agency, and was eventually sentenced to five years in federal prison.

It’s pretty rough on his 9/11 record too:

September 11th is obviously at the heart of Giuliani’s candidacy, so much so that his campaign would hardly be conceivable without it. Tens of millions—probably hundreds of millions—of Americans saw the images of him walking through clouds of dust that morning, and heard him reassuring the city, “New York is going to be here tomorrow morning, and it’s going to be here forever.” His handling of the disaster turned him from a not terribly popular lame duck into, in Oprah’s famous formula, “America’s Mayor.”

But many of those who are most knowledgeable about what happened on September 11th, or at least had the most at stake, are actively opposing Giuliani’s bid. The head of the city’s largest police union recently declared that his organization “could never support Rudy Giuliani for any elected office,” and the head of the city’s largest firefighters’ union has similarly made it known that his union, which three years ago endorsed George Bush, will not be endorsing Giuliani. “Rudy Giuliani is not the individual he portrays himself to be,” John McDonnell, the head of the city’s fire officers’ union, which is also working against the former mayor, told me. The 9/11 Commission has five Republican members, only one of whom is supporting Giuliani. (Three have declared for John McCain and the fifth has remained neutral.) Meanwhile, the man who set up the city’s Office of Emergency Management for Giuliani, Jerome Hauer, is

Old Habits: How The Giuliani Method May Defeat Him (The New Yorker)

The Spectator’s James Forsythe thinks Obama’s victory in Iowa makes him a favorite contender for the Democratic nomination. A former Iowan disagrees in the comments:

I am a former Iowan. Iowa is not the rest of the USA and its importance is really overblown. It has two types of people, rather extreme liberals, and extreme bible thumping conservatives. The smart centrist people are also there but they usually are too cold to go out and partake in the silly caucuses which they realize won´t add up to much. Before anybody gives too much significance to Iowa, ask yourself, what kind of people live there. It is mostly people who have failed to get away to someplace warmer and are stuck there dreaming of a warmer winter and a more pleasant summer. Iowa is awful both times of year. And spring is also bad for the allergies with all the pollen. It is flat and boring and people there drink too much to forget they are stuck in Iowa, or they spend a lot of time being saved (also part of the 12 step drying out plan) so lots of towns have many bars and many churches, the people vaccillate from one state to the other. The only similar area is the pacific northwest which has the added kicker of lots of high tech jobs and money, in addition to outstanding marijuana and other drugs. Iowans have to grow their own marijuana. Anyway they do not resemble the people in the rest of the country very much. So no one should make any presuppositions based on this vote which is representative of a tiny weird demographic.