Trippi Pontificates

John Deeth covered former Sen. John Edwards’s “major foreign policy address” in Iowa City today for Iowa Independent, and he spoke briefly with Joe Trippi at the beginning. Here’s what Trippi had to say about Clinton and, perhaps more interestingly, about Obama having missed his chance to make a dent in the race:

The focus on Clinton was also on the mind of Edwards advisor Joe Trippi, who was lurking near the press table at the back of the hall. “We’re here to keep making the clear differences between us and Hillary Clinton,” he told me before the speech. “On Iraq, she wants to continue combat missions, we want to end it. In Iran she’s bought into the terminology of the Bush administration of the `global war on terror,’ and Bush is already using that. Her vote to call the Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization was a mistake. We wouldn’t have done that, Biden didn’t, Dodd didn’t.”

Are Obama and Edwards canceling each other out in the race to be the Not Hillary candidate? “Obama’s been out there for 10 months, and he hasn’t really taken hold,” Trippi says. “In a lot of ways, he’s had his shot to make his case, and we’re just beginning to make ours,” he said, citing the recent debut of Edwards’s first major TV buy in Iowa. “People saw Edwards make his case in the debate and saw the differences with Hillary Clinton.”