The John Edwards campaign just held a conference call announcing its respectable but not Clinton or Obama-level expected third quarter fundraising total of $7 million and further explaining its thinking on the question of taking public matching funds for the primary, which will bring in roughly $10 million more. From the sound of what senior adviser Joe Trippi and deputy campaign manager Jonathan Prince had to say, the campaign is moving in a direction of intensifying its anti-Washington argument as a way of trying to draw sharper distinctions between John Edwards and Hillary Clinton, taking advantage of the recent Norman Hsu fundraising scandal and Clinton’s defense of lobbyists to portray her as part of “the corroded busted rigged system of Washington,” as Trippi described it.

“We don’t believe the Clinton campaign has a deep and abiding interest in having this election framed around money,” he said.

Asked about whether the campaign had similar concerns about Barack Obama, who is also rejecting the public financing system during the primary, and whose campaign recently announced more than 350,000 donors making more than 500,000 donations so far this year, Trippi’s voice changed and softened. “Up until today Obama has not joined us” in pledging to take public funds, he said. “Obama in the Senate race did take PAC and lobbyist money. In this race he hasn’t, but again, the sharpest division is between us and Hillary Clinton on this…At this point in time the American people are going to have a clear choice.”

This, I think, is a bit peculiar. By choosing to take public financing and go dark between sewing up the nomination, should Edwards win, and the Democratic convention, the Edwards campaign is threatening to take the Democratic Party back to the bad old days of financial inequality with Republicans. The Obama campaign, on the other hand, represents a real departure from that era, having raised more money from more people than any other campaign during the first two quarters. Further, there is no sign that the major 527 groups that tried to make up the fiscal difference between the parties in 2004 — America Coming Together, the Media Fund, and so on — are going to be around in 2008, meaning that there will be fewer, not more, outside groups able to defend the new Democratic contender from GOP attack during the months before the convention. And the Edwards campaign knows this.

“Were not aware of 527s that are doing anything now on anybody’s side in the primary,” said Trippi on the call. “And we are not going to encourage them.”

What, exactly, is the Edwards campaign trying to do then? The latest poll from Iowa, the one state that Edwards must win to gain enough momentum to launch a viable national campaign, showed Obama in the lead among likely caucus-goers — though with a 7 percent margin of error — and Edwards in third.

It seems to me that it would be political malpractice if the Obama campaign did not try to draw a contrast with Edwards in the months ahead on the topic of general election financial viability, and to sow concerns about Edwards’ electability on the very financial ground upon which he has chosen to make his stand against Clinton. The Edwards-Clinton financial fight outlined by the Edwards campaign today would seem to work only in the absence of a third alternative, a candidate (Obama) who is not taking lobbyist money or bringing in the bulk of his donations through bundled large-dollar donations, and who has proved himself eminently financially fit for a general election fight.

And so I offer three ways to interpret what’s going on here: a) the Edwards campaign is irresponsibly punting on the question of being able to win a general election until it can get through the primary, despite stakes that couldn’t be higher for the nation, and has private data that shows Clinton to be its major competitor (call that one the Markos theory); b) the Edwards campaign is making a short-term tactical mistake by ignoring the impending Obama threat while taking on Clinton; or c) Edwards is a person of principle who sees in the Obama campaign more of what he would like in the White House, and is going to go down in such a way as to try to take Clinton with him.

As always, feel free to offer your own interpretations in the comments.

–Crossposted from Tapped.

UPDATE 2: The video below has been taken down, but you can still watch it here, and with better sound quality.

***

Via Minipudit (another of the high school seniors who blog), comes this Saturday Night Live short featuring two of the hottest Jewish men in show business, Andy Samberg and Maroon 5′s Adam Levine, crooning a homoerotic love song to anti-gay, anti-Semitic Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad:

Soft power, at its finest, baby.

UPDATE: Lyrics here.

The New York Times finds the man who started the international poisoned Chinese toothpaste scare:

Eduardo Arias hardly fits the profile of someone capable of humbling one of the world’s most formidable economic powers.

A 51-year-old Kuna Indian, Mr. Arias grew up on a reservation paddling dugout canoes near his home on one of the San Blas islands off Panama’s Caribbean coast. He now lives in a small apartment above a food stand in Panama, the nation’s capital, also known as Panama City.

But one Saturday morning in May, Eduardo Arias did something that would reverberate across six continents. He read the label on a 59-cent tube of toothpaste. On it were two words that had been overlooked by government inspectors and health authorities in dozens of countries: diethylene glycol, the same sweet-tasting, poisonous ingredient in antifreeze that had been mixed into cold syrup here, killing or disabling at least 138 Panamanians last year.

Mr. Arias reported his discovery, setting off a worldwide hunt for tainted toothpaste that turned out to be manufactured in China. Health alerts have now been issued in 34 countries, from Vietnam to Kenya, from Tonga in the Pacific to Turks and Caicos in the Caribbean. Canada found 24 contaminated brands and New Zealand found 16. Japan had 20 million tubes. Officials in the United States unwittingly gave the toothpaste to prisoners, the mentally disabled and troubled youths. Hospitals gave it to the sick, while high-end hotels gave it to the wealthy.

People around the world had been putting an ingredient of antifreeze in their mouths and until Panama blew the whistle, no one seemed to know it….

Mr. Arias, who lives alone and does not own a car, went to buy blank CDs on May 5 at Vendela, a discount store where he had heard prices were so low that street vendors bought supplies there. Stepping into the store, a large display of toothpaste caught his eye.

“Without touching the tube, the letters were big enough for me to read: diethylene glycol,” Mr. Arias said.

A year ago, those words would have meant nothing to him. “Nobody had ever heard of this stuff,” Mr. Arias said. But a steady drumbeat of news about poison cough syrup had engraved the words in his mind.

“It was inconceivable to me that a known toxic substance that killed all these people could be openly on sale and that people would go on about their business calmly, selling and buying this stuff,” said Mr. Arias, who has a midlevel government job reviewing environmental reports.

Mr. Arias thought about alerting the store clerk but figured nothing would come of it. Instead, he bought a tube with the plan of turning it over to the health authorities.

And so he did.

Kit Seelye over at The NYT issues a bleg:

I’m writing a small column item for Monday’s Caucus blog about why more men seemed to be involved in politics online than women. I wondered if you 1) agreed with that and 2) why or why not.

This results in a comment thread that’s about as interesting as these things usually are, until we get to comment 41, where someone says something worth listening to, and which is worth reprinting in full:

Oh where to begin.

First let me say that I do not agree that more men than woman are involved on politics online – only that the men are louder, brasher and more apt to get attention from mainstream publications.

They are also more apt to support one and another, to link to each other repeatedly and build up an echo chamber that reinforces their dominance.

If you are talking about the political blogosphere, then indeed, you are likely talking about a cluster of well-known blogs that are dominated by men. Others will claim that this is not so – they will point to the fact that DailyKos has female contributors. I’d counter that we’ve not seen those women on “Meet the Press”. They’d point to the Huffington Post and Arianna’s success – I’d counter that Arianna is the face – an establishment figure who lent her name and commentary to a media venture created and funded by a man. Or they’ll point to FireDogLake and Jane Hamsher – whose blog has a cadre of diverse writers – which is the exception not the rule.

The truth is that when it comes to online politics many women have largely rejected the outfront role of blogging for the behind the scenes work of organizing – which brings with it infintely more satisfaction but sincerely less notoriety. For examples of this look to Gina Cooper, the founder and driving force behind the YearlyKos Convention, which was responsible in a large part for giving credibility to the men who are so often considered, “the blogosphere”. Or look to Speaker Pelosi’s office – where the internet operation has been run by a highly capable woman, Karina Newton for years. Other examples can be found in non-profits, campaigns and organizations where women have risen through the ranks of online organizing. Look at the New Organizing Institutes’s former executive director Roz LeMieux and current president Judith Freeman. Look at Zephyr Teachout from Dean 2004 and Amanda Michel now over at NewAssignment.net. These women are there – but they are often more powerful behind the scenes, building, organizing and actually making things happen.

This behind the scenes role can also be attributed to the large amount of sexism prevalent online that female bloggers deal with day in and day out, especially when they have the nerve to venture forward with a strong informed opinion.

However, to really find the women en mass you have to look beyond the incestuous political blogosphere (see Garance for more on that: http://thegarance.com/archives/768) to the larger blogosphere. There you will find the feminist bloggers, largely disconnected from the political blogosphere, despite their liberal leanings. These women have been blogging for years, yet are rarely linked to by the male-dominated political blogosphere – though there are a few exceptions, the occasional rant of Amanda Marcotte, more famous post-Edwards, when the “bloggers” could claim her as one of their own, Feministing.com’s brash Jessica Valenti, author of a new book, who has achieved a good deal of cross-blogosphere pollination in the past year and the odd crosspost over on HuffPo.

You could also look toward the Mommy Bloggers – a sphere where Silicon Valley Mom Blog and affiliates meet with Elizabeth Edwards and no one in the political sphere notices, or where BlogHer brings over a thousand woman to Chicago the same week as the YearlyKos convention but the political campaigns scarcely notice, despite an entire track devoted to politics.

The truth is woman are out there and they are frustrated that the media constantly cites the same loud men as representatives of the blogosphere. These men have done some good things, that is true – but they have not done everything and it’s time someone recognized that.

The women are there, if you care to notice them.

— Posted by a woman on the inside

Whoever you are, we should have lunch.

In the latest issue of Gourmet. It’s not online, unfortunately, but the subhed to “Kabul Nights” is “Most of the restaurants in Afghanistan’s capital, where there are few named streets and no addresses, are tough to find. One clue: Look for the guards.” I love when the upscale glossies do spreads on such places.

One smart Washington technologist recently pointed out an interesting divide between the staffs of the Barack Obama and John Edwards campaigns, which both employ a fair number of former Howard Dean staffers. There was a split at the end of the Dean campaign between those loyal to Dean, he explained, and those loyal to Joe Trippi, who memorably departed the Dean headquarters in Burlington on the heels of Dean’s spectacular Iowa collapse and second-place New Hampshire finish.

Obama got the Dean loyalists, some of whom had followed the former Vermont governor to the DNC when he took over as chair, while Edwards took on the Trippi people, including eventually Joe Trippi himself.

Should Edwards win the Democratic nomination, the observer pointed out, the historic bad blood between Trippi and Dean would lead to some interesting interpersonal dynamics, as Dean’s DNC would have to work hand in hand with Trippi to elect Edwards.

That potential dynamic just got a whole lot more important thanks to the Edwards campaign’s decision to accept public matching funds for the primary election. As Edwards campaign manager David Bonior pointed out in a memo explaining the decision:

What happens between February 5th and the convention?

…part of this campaign is about restoring the power of the Democratic Party. Since the party can spend money independently of its Presidential nominee, a stronger Democratic Party will be in a position to meet the challenge of waging an effective campaign on behalf of John Edwards and every other Democratic candidate.

The Edwards campaign now promises to rely on the Dean DNC to defend the Trippi-advised candidate, should he win the nomination. Everyone involved is a professional and I’m sure the DNC would do everything it could, but this just seems, well, complicated.