More thoughts from a senior aide to a candidate who did participate in the Ames straw poll:

On Hillary: “There are going to be two major moments in the general election. The first will be when any one of our guys says or does something patronizing – either in a campaign ad, or an interview, or during a debate with Hillary, just having the wrong tone of voice or expression could get three million women across the country to jump out of their chairs.

But the other is going to be if Hillary says or does something ever-so-slightly patronizing, or disrespectful, or dismissive of religious voters. The first time she does that, it’s game over for her.

That’s why the debates with Hillary are going to be real high-wire acts, for both candidates…

You know, there are two million pages of documents from first lady’s office that the National Archives has said they don’t think they’ll get around to releasing before the election. If we had an RNC, they would be jumping all over this. But they’re just missing… The DNC is framing our guys every day with this steady stream of releases they send out. Same thing with the state parties. But there’s nothing comparable going on on our side.”

On debates: ”On the Democratic side, the DNC took over the debate schedule. Right now, there are something like 25 debate invitations, and nobody wants to do all of them. So which ones do you accept? That’s where the YouTube issue came from. There are zillions on the list, we’ve already done one CNN debate — why do another? Why do a CNN debate when our voters watch Fox?

And I don’t blame the questioners, I blame CNN for picking goofy questions. The medium of having voters submit questions on video is fine, but Anderson Cooper is not my ideal choice to ask Barack Obama if he’s black enough… And Chris Matthews? He was practically spitting on our candidates, he was foaming at the mouth so much…”

On my thoughts contrasting serious immigration reformer Duncan Hunter vs. Tom “Nuke Mecca and Medina in response to nuclear terrorism” Tancredo: “Well, I wouldn’t give the nuclear launch codes to Tom Tancredo.”