When Rudy Giuliani was in Minneapolis this week, a week marked by by increasingly bitter rhetoric among the Republican presidential frontrunners, he was asked about the apparent violation of Ronald Reagan’s 11th Commandment (thou shalt not speak ill of thy Republican brethren).

He was all sweetness and light, saying he doesn’t engage in that kind of thing. “If you look at my statements, you’ll see I get criticized for spending too much time on the Democrats,” he said. “The only time I mention [other Republicans] is when I have to defend myself against false charges and exaggerated charges.” As the party’s current front runner, “the liability is that everyone else shoots at you,” he continued. “I’ve been in politics a long time and you deal with the hand you’ve been dealt. I don’t take it personally, but if I’m falsely attacked, I have to answer.”

That was Thursday morning. Within 24 hours, Giuliani’s campaign fired off its own shot against Mitt Romney in an e-mail to reporters that went on for 10 pages. Its subject line? “MITT & HILLARY SINGING FROM THE SAME SONG SHEET.”

On topics ranging from Roe vs. Wade to abortion and gun control, the campaign cherry-picked quotes from Romney and Hillary Clinton in a way that made them look like political. Siamese twins. Its conclusion: “Mitt Romney’s latest political pandering proves yet again he is merely a candidate of convenience. Mitt’s ever-changing positions and negative attacks scream of a losing candidate who has spent millions of his own money only to find Republican voters want something he cannot buy — true leadership.”

  In other intra-party squabbling news, Barack Obama sent out his own e-mail to reporters Friday that actually mentioned Clinton by name in an attack, something he’s been loath to do to date. By holding a rural issues forum at a Washington lobbying firm, the e-mail read, “it seems like Senator Clinton is listening to Washington lobbyists instead of spending time in Iowa with folks who have been farming for decades.” However, the harsh words weren’t attributed to the candidate who says he’s not going to wallow in the attack politics of the past. Rather, they were placed in the mouth of Gary Lamb, the former head of the Iowa Farmer’s Union.
 

And it’s still only October…      

Now that the third-quarter presidential fundraising stats have been released by the Federal Election Commission, some interesting nuggets emerged about contributors from Minnesota, beyond the big-picture story of the money race.

If a report in The Hill, the insidery Capitol Hill newspaper, has it right, former Vice President Walter Mondale is going to endorse Hillary Clinton for president. Neither Mondale nor the Clinton campaign responded to the paper’s requests for comment; Mondale’s spokeswoman this morning said the story is “speculative” and said her boss would not comment on it and a Clinton spokeswoman said the campaign had no announcement on the possible endorsement. The Hill’s story pointed out that such an endorsement could reverberate nicely for Clinton in neighboring Iowa. And the endorsement of Minnesota’s most prominent Democrat (and the highest-ranking former government official to back Clinton) could play well here, too, when the Feb. 5 caucuses roll around.

Thoughts?

That sound you hear is the ground shifting ever more decidedly toward the inevitability of Hillary Clinton becoming the Dems’ presidential nominee. Although the punditocracy has been declaring that her prospects for overwhelming the field have been growing for weeks, that was always accompanied by a “yes, but …” The “but” here has been the fact that the opening round in Iowa remained very much a three-candidate race, too close to call among Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards. Then the Des Moines Register dropped this bombshell into the race on Sunday.

Suddenly, it was harder for Clinton’s opponents to wave away her big, consistent leads in national polls as irrelevant to the on-the-ground campaign in Iowa. They were reduced to invoking the political ghost of Howard Dean, who was leading in Iowa at this point during the 2004 election cycle.

And the fact remains that leading in the runup to the Iowa caucuses, or even winning them, is by no means a free ticket to the White House, much less the nomination. And a failure to win them isn’t necessarily a ticket to oblivion. After all, in 1972, George McGovern ran second in Iowa, as Jimmy Carter did four years later, which was considered a decisive step toward their winning the Democratic nomination (that’s the Iowa Expectations Game at work: Do better — or worse — than expected and it can totally scramble the significance of the subsequent primaries). And while George H.W. Bush thumped Ronald Reagan in the 1980 Republican caucuses, everyone remembers who ended up at the top of that particular ticket.

Back to this year, the expectations game could yet come back to bite Clinton, as David Yepsen, the Register’s legendary political columnist, explained after the poll numbers were published.

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Well, that certainly didn’t take very long.

Just a week after the purveyors of the conventional wisdom declared, once and for all, the inevitability of Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee (a development noted over at the Big Question), the punditocracy’s inevitable course correction is already well underway.

In rapid succession, Time, the Politico and the Liberal Bigfeet of the New York Times’ op-ed page dumped cold water on the notion, citing everything from Clinton’s Bionic Woman persona to the fact that more than anything else, the Media Elite loves covering a knockdown, dragout contest.

Here’s Joe Klein’s take. Here’s the Politico’s. Over at the Times, Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd took turns at picking Clinton to pieces.

P.S. It’s not just a Democratic parlor game. Something similar has been happening to Rudy Giuliani, long the apparently prohibitive frontrunner on the Republican’s side. The most recent puncture wound was inflicted by New York Magazine, long a Giuliani tormentor. And the Times piled on with its own version, too.

This week, forget for a moment the poll numbers and follow the dollar signs. Even before the third-quarter campaign fundraising deadline passed at midnight Sunday, the presidential campaigns were furiously spinning forward to put the best face on the size of the piles of cash they (and/or their rivals) were going to report to the Federal Election Commission.

On the Democratic side, both the Obama and Clinton campaigns were playing the reverse expectation game, each saying they expected to underperform their chief rival. It will be interesting to see if Hillary Clinton has, indeed, tapped out with her biggest donors as many analysts said after the second quarter ended. An equally intriguing question about Barack Obama: Was he able to continue his record-breaking fundraising pace during the past three months, a period when he plateaued in the polls? Rounding out the party’s top tier, was John Edwards’ announcement last week that he would accept an estimated $10 million in public financing an acknowledgment that his fundraising had stalled. And will any of the second-tier Democratic candidates get a lift from better-than-expected numbers.

As for the Republicans, this will be the first real test of Fred Thompson’s fundraising heft, since it’s the first quarter he’s actually been in the race. Although Mitt Romney had been the party’s top money-raiser during the first six months of the year, that was accomplished only through an infusion of millions of bucks from his own wallet. How will he and Rudy Giuliani fare? And John McCain is in the same boat as Edwards, expected to go to the public-financing well to replenish his less-than-steller fundraising.

If you’re not satisfied with the spin of the the pundits and campaign operatives on the current state of the money race, you can look at the raw figures yourself and poke around to your heart’s content here.

Update: For what it’s worth, Obama’s campaign was the first out of the e-mailbox at midday Monday, with these detailed bragging rights: Third quarter totals:• Primary dollars raised: at least $19 million