Is the Obama campaign behind the new push polls?

The 'Ugly' Iowa calls

Mark Blumenthal makes a convincing case that those Iowa calls that I've been obsessing about really aren't "message-testing" at all, but really old-fashioned push polling, a genuine dirty trick.

These oddly constructed questions look mostly to me like a clumsy attempt to dress up as a "poll" the beyond-the-pale reference to Elizabeth Edwards' illness.

At very least, I find it utterly inconceivable that Harrison Hickman or the Edwards campaign had any connection to a five-question survey of this sort, and extremely implausible that it was part of any real poll conducted by anyone else.

So who would be doing this?

The bottom line is that I have no idea who is behind it, but we ought to consider another scenario as at least as plausible as the notion that this came from one of the Democratic campaigns. It is also possible that this was the work of some independent group with Republican ties that sees some value in gathering crude information about the Democratic race while fomenting ill-will and infighting in the Democratic ranks. If that was the goal, you need only read the comments under the posts of the blogger/respondents I linked to above to evidence of just that happening.

After talking to Blumenthal today, I went back to one of the respondents, "desmoinesdem," to ask her about some of these details: Was she asked about whether she plans to vote, or about her age or party affiliation. She wasn't.

Which is to say that my initial instinct -- that, as often with standard message testing, people who received the call misunderstood it's aim -- was probably wrong; and the outraged bloggers were more or less right.

http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/1107/The_Ugly_Iowa_calls.html