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By Pejman Yousefzadeh Posted in 2008 | Barack Obama | dirty tricks | Hillary Clinton — Comments (2) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

The Republican Presidential nomination will likely be settled, or close to settled, the day after Super Tuesday.

The Democratic Presidential nomination? Well . . .

Read on . . .

Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were locked in a near dead heat two days before the biggest presidential voting so far while John McCain tried to nail down the Republican nomination for the White House.

With 24 states holding nominating contests from coast to coast on Tuesday, the candidates crisscrossed the country, leading rallies and urging supporters to get out and vote.

The Democratic race had narrowed to a nearly a draw in recent national polls while McCain hoped to win enough delegates to the national convention to effectively be the party's presidential nominee in the November election.

Obama held a slight lead in California, the biggest prize of all where Clinton once led handily, and was virtually tied with Clinton in New Jersey and Missouri -- three of the states voting on "Super Tuesday" -- in a Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby poll released on Sunday.

And I guess that's why we now have this:

Ed Coghlan was just starting to prepare his dinner in the northern San Fernando Valley the other night when the phone rang. The caller was very friendly. He identified himself as a pollster who wanted to ask registered independents like Coghlan a few questions about the presidential race and all the candidates for Super Tuesday's California primary.

Ed, who's a former news director for a local TV station, was curious. He said, "Sure, go ahead."

But a few minutes into the conversation Ed says he noticed a strange pattern developing to the questions. First of all, the "pollster" was only asking about four candidates, three Democrats -- Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards, who was still in the race at the time -- and one Republican -- John McCain.

Also, every question about Clinton was curiously positive, Coghlan recalls. The caller said things like, if you knew that Sen. Clinton believed the country had a serious home mortgage problem and had made proposals to....

freeze mortgage rates and save families from foreclosure, would you be more likely or less likely to vote for her?

Ed said, of course, more likely.

Every question about the other candidates was negative. If Ed knew, for instance, that as a state senator Obama had voted "present" 43 times instead of taking a yes or no stand "for what he believed," would Ed be more or less likely to vote for him?

"That's when I caught on," said Coghlan. He realized then that he was being push-polled. That malicious political virus that is designed not to elicit answers but to spread positive information about one candidate and negative information about all others under the guise of an honest poll had arrived in Southern California within days of the important election.

Bill Clinton may not be saying nasty things about Barack Obama on the campaign trail anymore. But it's not as if the dirty tricks of the Clinton campaign have stopped. Far from it.