It's the Larry Summers Memorial Thanksgiving Gab Fest. This is the Slate Political Gab Fest for Friday, November 23, 2007. I'm Dale Willman. On this week's agenda, Obama surges in Iowa, a stem cell breakthrough, and D.C.'s handgun law

goes to court. And now to introduce the discussion, here's John.

Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gab Fest. I'm John Dickerson with Emily Bazelon and David Plotz.

We're going to start with politics again this week because I don't have any

introduction nothing witty to say nothing not a no that's it a happy Thanksgiving

belatedly happy holiday weekend why do you say holiday weekend because it's like the

long holiday weekend just in case people listen on Friday and happy thanksgiving But it's unnecessarily vague. It's not because the rest of the year you have to be vague about everybody's religion. You have to say happy holidays because you don't want to step on anybody's toes. Thanksgiving is the one you can come down firmly and say happy Thanksgiving because everybody's celebrating it. Okay. Happy Thanksgiving.

You strive for specificity at the Gab Fest.

This week, in the Democratic race for president, there was some more polls in Iowa that showed that Barack Obama is on the top edge of a statistical dead heat in Iowa, the only state that seems to matter in democratic politics right now.

And what interested me about that is that two things. One, Obama has been

going negative or being critical of Clinton for three weeks and doesn't seem to pay to a price.

There was a big worry that he might. Secondly, that Hillary Clinton is now engaging. And she is now,

and I want it, we will have a little reading here, but she made fun of Barack Obama who said

that he understood foreign affairs because he had lived overseas.

And she then came.

When he was a child.

He had lived overseas.

He didn't mention the part about when he was a child.

But when he did live overseas in Indonesia, he was in fact a child.

And so Hillary Clinton said, voters will judge whether living in a foreign country at the age of age 10 prepares one to face the big, complex international challenges the next president will face. This was interesting because she engaged. This wasn't like at a debate where it's back and forth. This was in a set piece speech of hers. So this is a real turning point in the campaign. She's no longer flying above, talking about the Republicans, ignoring the attacks from the others.

She's actually affirmatively going after him.

And he came back and said basically that when she talks about world leaders and all the ones she's met,

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