The Obama campaign is getting a little desperate. The latest polling of both North & South Carolina have Clinton at over 40% and Obama around 16%. So the campaign has done what campaigns always do when they are low in polls. They declare polls don’t matter and then point to other polls of different things to prove it.

The latest is the campaigns assertion that in 2004 Joe Lieberman was the leader in polls for the Democratic nomination. The Huffington Post finds the problem in that comparison.

But a review of national presidential polls from mid-September 2003 shows that history isn’t nearly as cut and dry as the Obama campaign portrays.

Among national polls taken in mid-September 2003, Lieberman led in just one: a Sept. 10-13 ABC News survey of all Democratic-leaning voters. Lieberman received 20 percent support versus 15 percent for Howard Dean and 14 percent for both Richard Gephardt and John Kerry. However, when the ABC News poll was limited to Democratic-leaning likely voters, Howard Dean held a slim lead with 20 percent, compared to 19 percent for Lieberman and Kerry.

A Newsweek poll taken Sept. 18-19, 2003 among “registered Democrats and independents who lean Democratic” found that both Hillary Clinton and Al Gore received far more support than any of the declared presidential candidates. Thirty-three percent said they preferred Clinton, while 28 percent backed Gore. Wesley Clark and Howard Dean both polled at 7 percent, and Joe Lieberman and John Kerry polled at 5 percent.

In other words, Lieberman was by no means the clear national frontrunner in mid-September 2003. The polling then was decidedly mixed, in contrast to Clinton’s current dominant lead in the Democratic primaries.

So not only was Lieberman not the clear frontrunner in the polling, Hillary Clinton who wasn’t running was winning polls then too.