During the course of the hour and 45-minute CNN debate between Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, the RNC communications department was busy sending out emails to reporters on the issues discussed and the candidates’ statements, as they usually do.

Danny Diaz, one of the staffers at the RNC, sent out a total of 13 emails during the debate tonight - 12 of which focused on Mr. Obama. Diaz questioned Obama’s stance on Cuba, immigration, economic policies, foreign policy, and troop funding. He also sent out a couple of emails with the subject: “Another Lifted Line by Obama?”

When asked if this means the RNC has determined Obama the frontrunner, Diaz responded, “What we do is a reflection of political reality.”

Barack Obama released a new ad called “Desperate” today to dispel Hillary Clinton’s latest effort to show Wisconsin voters that Barack Obama has something to hide by refusing to debate her before Tuesday’s primary.

Something Wisconsin Governor (and Obama backer) Jim Doyle described as dirty politics. “For her to do this - claiming that Senator Obama somehow isn’t making himself available when he has been all over the state, and as we speak today, she has yet to even be in the state during the week leading up to this primary,” he said on a conference call yesterday**. “Fact is, he’s out here in the state having a one-sided debate right now and the only campaign she has going on in Wisconsin is negative TV ads,” he added later.

“Desperate” is Obama’s second ad set to air in the Badger State to respond to Clinton’s own second ad questioning Obama’s reasons for refusing a debate. The announcer starts by saying there have already been 18 debates with two more scheduled next week.

“Here’s the truth. Obama has a plan to protect Social Security benefits and the current retirement age. Hillary doesn’t. On health care, even Bill Clinton’s Labor Secretary says Obama covers more people than Hillary. And Obama sponsored a bill to end tax breaks for oil companies,” the announcer reads, responding to claims from the previous Clinton ad. “Tired of the same old politics? Vote for change we can believe in,” the ad ends.

In a media availability yesterday, Obama called debates an “exercise” that has become “predicatable.” He explained, “I could make the arguments on behalf of senator Clinton that she would make against me in a debate. We all know them. You guys could too. And I’m sure the same applies to the other side, on the other hand, when we have a chance to talk to voters directly, when we have a chance to give them a sense of where we want to take the country and that’s my priority in these closing weeks.”

**Senator Clinton will make her first trip to Wisconsin this week when she arrives later today to speak at the state Democratic Party’s Founders Day Dinner in Milwaukee, where Senator Obama will also be speaking.

There has been a lot of back and forth between the campaigns (with the press often as intermediaries) on adding more debates to the schedule. After the indecisive Super Tuesday outcome, Clinton accepted four debate invitations. Obama stalled, and after a few days of questions from the press, agreed to two. The candidate maintained that he could better utilize his time by greeting voters because they find the more the candidate campaigns, the better he does.

Not good enough for Clinton - who began running an ad in the state of Wisconsin, scolding Obama for not accepting a debate prior to the state’s contest on February 19th. Obama countered with his own ad, where the narrator reads, “After 18 debates, with two more coming, Hillary says Barack Obama is ducking debates? It’s the same old politics of phony charges and false attacks.”

Today at his Milwaukee media availability, I asked Obama about Clinton’s repeated claims that he is ducking debates. Here’s his response:

Senator Clinton put out yet another ad on debates today:

“Maybe he doesn’t want to explain why his health care plan leaves out 15 million people and Hillary’s covers everyone. Or why he voted to pass billions in Bush giveaways to the oil companies, but Hillary didn’t. Or why he said he might raise the retirement age and cut benefits for Social Security. But Hillary won’t. Why won’t Barack Obama debate these differences? Wisconsin deserves better.”

Expect this argument to continue - at least until the next scheduled debate on Thursday in Austin.

Since the Clinton campaign announced it had accepted five invitations from television networks to debate yesterday (including one from FOX News), Barack Obama and his staffers have been asked repeatedly if they would also agree to participate in the debates. Both staffers and Obama himself did not give yes or no answers, but hinted they would probably not agree to all of the offers.

Well, today the campaign announced it has agreed to participate in just two debates prior to the March 4th primaries. Obama accepted NBC’s invitation to debate Senator Clinton on February 26th in Ohio, and agreed to another in Texas before March 4th that was not on Clinton’s list.

Earlier today on a flight from Louisiana to Nebraska, Obama, the candidate was asked again about the then unresolved matter. “I’ve got to spend time with voters. We got seven primaries in seven days. You know, Sen. Clinton’s better known in a lot of these states. I’ve got to do more work on the ground. But we’ll have more debates,” he said. “It is very important for me to have voter contact. What we’ve seen is in those states where I have time to campaign and people have a chance to meet me, I do better.”

Look below the jump to read the campaign’s press release   (more…)

Sen Clinton’s team has launched a full court press to shame Barack Obama into agree to a series of one-on-one debates in the run-up to March 4 primaries in Ohio and Texas.

Clinton’s campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle sent a letter to her counterpart David Plouffe with the Obama campaign, saying she was “disappointed” that Obama rejected doing more debates. “I think we can do better and so does Hillary,” she wrote.

And in a series of daily talking points for surrogates and supporters on the topic, the campaign says Obama “has refused to join Hillary in Ohio for a conversation about making a difference in people’s lives.” The campaign is tying Obama’s refusal to electability, saying “candidates that aren’t ready to debate Hillary one-on-one aren’t ready to debate Sen. McCain.”

Stories that she’s low on funds — loaning her campaign $5 million from the Clinton family’s personal fortune and asking senior staff to go without pay — have fueled speculation that the hefty debate schedule is devised to give her free media appearances in these important, and sometimes expensive, TV markets.

Obama has said he won’t allow the Clinton campaign to dictate his schedule, but the campaign says they will make a decision regarding debates very soon.

Read the campaign’s letter and talking points after the break.

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Obama Campaign Manager David Plouffe told reporters today that the campaign is focusing on Super Tuesday and had not “thought about [upcoming debates] yet.” After the Clinton campaign held a conference call in part to discuss four debates they had agreed to, including one hosted by FOX News, Plouffe was asked by reporters about whether or not they too would participate.

“We’re obviously going to set our schedule including debates, and there will be more debates, but our schedule is not going to be dictated by the Clinton campaign,” he said. “I mean, it is kind of the tactic out of the second-tier congressional campaign playbooks, so we’re a little surprised they spent so much time talking about it today,” Plouffe noted.

Clinton communications director Howard Wolfson just announced that the campaign has accepted a Fox News invitation for a one-on-one debate with Barack Obama in Washington DC on February 11 — the day before the so-called Potomac Primary featuring DC, Virginia, and Maryland. The debate would also air locally on the DC Fox affiliate WTTG.

Clinton also accepted invitations for debates from ABC, where the two candidates would appear on This Week on Sunday; from CNN in Ohio on Feb 27th, and from MSNBC in Texas on the 28th. Both states hold important primaries on March 4th — a date the Clinton campaign anticipates could decide the close delegate race.

Wolfson said the party has been clamoring for more head-to-head debates between the two candidates left standing; “voters ought to have the opportunity to see these two candidates compete against each other in a one-on-one setting.”

And he disputed one reporter’s observation that the candidate calling for debates is usually the candidate who’s in trouble — saying that usually happens with a candidate with low name recognition, a problem Sen Clinton obviously doesn’t have.

Senior strategist and Clinton pollster Mark Penn said the ball’s in Obama’s court on the debates. “Up down or sideways, we’ve been willing participants in debates,” he said. “It’s up to the Obama campaign as to whether they will be as the race has narrowed to a choice between Sen Obama and Hilary Clinton.”

Liberal activists in moveon.org and the blogosphere, as well as former candidate John Edwards, scuttled a Democratic debate on Fox earlier this year. Asked by one of those liberal bloggers, Jane Hamsher of FireDogLake, whether accepting the FNC invitation would “legitimize” Fox News, Wolfson pointed out that both Sen Obama and Sen Clinton have appeared multiple times on Fox — and that the offer to rebroadcast the debate to reach more local voters sweetened the deal.

Kicking off the pre-program festivities at the Kodak Theater, the head of the California Democratic Party just compared this debate to the most important political face-offs of all time: “Lincoln-Douglas; Nixon-Kenney; and Obama-Clinton,” he said.

Most don’t expect tonight’s proceedings to enter that historic pantheon, but there is a lot of anticipation for the first head-to-head debate in the Democratic Party.

Two schools of thought: one, Obama continues to hammer away at Hillary, as he did in a speech in Denver last night and during the last debate in Myrtle Beach, SC — but without John Edwards to come to her defense, as Edwards often did in South Carolina. It’s plausible because she’s still the front-runner and the attacks could bring her down a peg, and because he seems to come off looking more presidential than she does when things get heated.

Or two, in the last debate before a massive contest on February 5th — where no matter who wins the most states, the delegate counts are likely to end up fairly close — both candidates could decide to play it safe, keeping it civil so as not to risk a disastrous misstep. If both candidates are feeling good about their standing going into Super Tuesday, we may not see the kind of fireworks that went off in the last debate.

One early indication of how things will go: some pre-debate smack-talk from Clinton spokesman Phil Singer, who asks “Which Barack Obama will show up at tonight’s Democratic debate?” — the one who Singer says once eschewed personal attacks, or the one who he says has been “personally launching or allowing his campaign to launch a series of personal negative attacks against Hillary Clinton.”

Read the full memo after the break.

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Los Angeles, CA-

After a debate where Mike Huckabee was largely left on the sidelines with Libertarian Ron Paul, due to a format that favored the two leading contenders, John McCain, and Mitt Romney, Huckabee is looking for a boost in the last days before the mega-state primaries on February, 5th. Huckabee today embarks on a pre-Tsunami Tuesday campaign swing that will lead him through many of the Southern, and Heartland states-like Alabama, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Georgia- that are at the center of his Southern state strategy; the last stand for this Little-Train-That-Could of GOP presidential campaigns.

” I am optimistic about our chances and the path forward seems clear,” Huckabee said, in a message titled “Full Throttle”, to supporters yesterday.”When I look at Super Tuesday, I see a number of key Southern states, and other strong  conservative states, that are likely to add to our delegate count and put us on the right track towards winning the Republican nomination.”

However, due to McCain’s  freight train-like momentum, after back to back primary wins, and gargantuan endorsements like the Governator’s today in California( a delegate-heavy Super Tuesday state), Huckabee’s effort, while herculean, could fall well short of it’s intended target. Verifiable signs of the tough road head for the Huckabee campaign are already appearing, like large hurdles in front of a sprinter, trying to catch up to the lead runner. According to poll numbers released today in some of those Southern states, McCain leads Huckabee by double digits.

Insider Advantage has McCain leading Huckabee in Tennessee, 33 to 25. In Georgia, where Huckabee campaigned recently, he is down 11 points, 35 to 24 (5% MOE).

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Post your comments! Opinions! What did you think of the debate? Some of us thought it was a snooze. You?