Not “the republicans”. But some republicans, sure. Some crazy people, some unhinged Democrats, a libertarian or two. A load of paid professional hacks.
By the time we’re done, we will have seen hundreds of pictures of Michelle Obama looking “angry” and Barack Obama just standing around with his thumb up his ass within view of an AMERICAN FLAG. There will be group photos of Obama with lots of much “blacker” people. There will be clips of Obama’s oratory isolated to when it gets maybe a little fervent or gospelish. There will be classmates from the school in Indonesia. There will be a Harvard man or two who confesses young Barry’s designs on communist collectivism. There will be members of the UCC parish in Chicago who accuse him of being faithless. There will be more gay prostitutes. There will be one or two people who are recent converts of “the Obama cult” who have now seen the light. There will be photoshops of Obama chilling with Wahhabists and insinuations that he is a Manchurian candidate. There will be money trails into the dark heart of Chicago politics. There will be extensive explorations into the affairs of his Kenyan absentee father.
Exactly. They’re welcome to send whatever they damned well please to Drudge, but to pretend they’re doing it for any reason besides trying to win the racist vote, or some such, is absurd.
And any campaign that feeds stuff to Drudge has no business accusing another campaign of echoing GOP talking points. When a Dem feeds Drudge, s/he’s working with someone who’s on the other side - both in terms of Dem v. GOP and in terms of debating the issues v. going after ‘gotcha’ crap.
I am fascinated with the turban strategy. With one move, Hillary has completely lost the credibility needed to say “Shame on you, Barack Obama” without causing people to give her the finger.
And to think that Hillary fired her previous campaign manager only to get someone who’d sign off on this. Amazing, simply amazing.
I don’t have anything to contribute on whether the pollsters are talking to the right people, but: right now the RCP averages have Clinton up by 2.8% in TX, and 8.8% in OH.
Like it or not, a 3% win and a 9% win, even in big states like Ohio and Texas, don’t balance out Obama’s string of routs in the last 11 primaries. (As it turns out, the combined population of Texas and Ohio is almost exactly that of nine states (including DC) that Obama has won since Super Tuesday.) As Eugene Robinson pointed out the other day, if the shoe were on the other foot, if Obama had lost that many primaries in a row, the entire Democratic establishment would be pushing for him to get out, reporters and pundits would be asking him why he was refusing to drop out, etc.
Personally, I don’t think candidates should drop out just because they are running considerably behind, if they feel they can make a better case for themselves as President than the other candidates can. I think organizers of debates and the like ought to have (and spell out their) standards for screening out vanity candidates like Kucinich, Gravel, Hunter, etc. who fail to draw significant support, but I’m all for their staying in until the last primary has been held, or until they’re mathematically eliminated, whichever happens first.
But I think the means of getting ahead should be winning delegates that people actually voted for in primaries and caucuses dedicated to that purpose, and that catching up should have to do with winning delegates as a result of people actually voting for you in future primaries and caucuses.
The Hillary campaign seems to be more intent on merely making it close enough with respect to support from actual voters and the delegates they elect, so that they can muddy the waters in a number of ways: by claiming that they’re winning the states that matter, by appealing to superdelegates, by pressing the MI/FL issue. I say, nuts to that.
In the last couple of days, Clinton has taken to openly mocking Obama’s supporters by saying that they’re waiting for a “celestial choir” to solve their problems, telling them to “get real” and now is using Muslims as a fear-point with the Obama photo (much like her campaign’s previous reports of Obama attending a radical school). Regardless of whether or not every politican wears traditional garb while on the road", there’s a legitimate question as to why she pushed this photo on the the press. I think the answer is painfull transparent.
I won’t pretend to have been a Clinton supporter but her tactics of using alienation and racial/ethnic fears seem completely counter to supporting the notion of a Democratic presidency. She seems completely off her rocker the past few days, a regular bull in the china shop as she destroys anything and everything between herself and the door.
She’s been shown the door and she’s decided to trash the room before leaving. I just wrote a brief email to her blog on her website, I know it won’t get published, but at least someone will read it and throw it away, All I wanted was for one person in her campaign to read these words.
To whom it may concern,
If the current tactic of the Clinton campaign is to appeal to the racist, bigoted population of the United States, than someone working for that campaign would need to think about their motives for supporting a woman who thinks that type of tactic is OK. Exploiting a fear the American Public has of a group of muslim fundamentalists, by using a photo of a man who is not a muslim fundamentalist is both pathetic and utterly deplorable.
My first reaction to the turban photo was disgust. It’s a dog whistle tactic, and no, simply saying that Hillary also wears traditional garb in other countries misses the point. Everyone knows that Obama has been fighting “he’s a Muslim!11!!” slurs the entire campaign (not that there’s anything at all wrong with being Muslim, of course).
I also didn’t like Williams’ response at first. However, thinking about this further, I’m also disappointed that people aren’t scrutinizing the Drudge Report. Who are these “staffers” who sent the photo to him (which apparently first appeared in the National Enquirer back in 2006)? I also imagine the campaign is calling up every staffer, all 700, to find out if the photo did indeed come from one of them. At this time, it would be stupid for Williams to come out and say “none of our staffers did it” without investigating it first. Kind of like how the Obama campaign was left with egg on their face when it was discovered that they were the ones promoting talking points about the Clintons being racists in SC.
I would have liked a “if anyone on this campaign staff distributed the photo in an attempt to smear Obama, they will be dismissed” type statement. But I still go back to the fact that it would be a brilliant “twofer” smear - slime Obama and the Clinton camp at the same time. And we’re basing this all on the word of Matt Drudge. He’s been correct at times, but he’s also been wrong.
His report also does not say that the source sent the e-mail on the condition of anonymity. So why not disclose who sent it, or at least the domain name? I can’t imagine anyone in the Clinton campaign being this stupid - surely, something as sleazy as this would be circulated another way, like from a friend of a friend of a friend? But according to Drudge, frustrated staffers (note the plural) sent this to him. So it wasn’t just one.
Long story short - if this indeed has the imprimatur of the Clinton camp, it’s pretty pathetic. I still think Clinton is the superior candidate, but this would be a major, major error that reflects extremely poorly on her. On the other hand, I’m not willing to blindly believe that this did indeed originate with the campaign - at least from the officials. Trust me, there are kooks supporting HRC, BO, and JM, and I’m sure they’re sending out smear jobs all the time. So I reserve judgment for the time being.
I have gone from mild sympathy (“It’s too bad she had such horrible campaign management”) to mild approval (“Well, hopefully she’ll continue to be a force in the Senate”) to, I don’t know… fear and disgust?
This is a woman who, as president, would have to deal with a withdrawl from Iraq and relations with that nation, our stand-off with Iran, Syrian meddling in Iraq, Israel & Palestine, Turkish military action in Kurdish Iraq, a new government in Pakistan and no doubt other problems that don’t immediately spring to mind involving Muslim nations. And her campaign uses a photo of Obama in a turban as a fear tactic?? She tried to inflame anti-Obama sentiment by linking him to Islam??
I’m still willing to accept that the Drudge Report is lying or mistaken. Let Hillary Clinton come forward immediately to denounce the story and deny any involvement from her campaign. If the Drudge Report wants to stand by it, let them show the evidence. But Williams’ “non-denial” of (essentially) “What’s so bad about it? Now go away” doesn’t speak well at all.
I wouldn’t expect Williams to come out and say “none of our staffers did it”, but surely she could said some CYA spiel about investigating and taking appropriate actions. Maybe she did say that and Drudge conveniently left that part out. But what she did say was bad enough.
I’m glad. This is how I would hope fair-minded people with minds of their own would react.
But there’s another side of this. Obama’s campaign is responding in a forceful way - not like the response to the plagiarism charges, for instance. It would be just as easy to state, “This photo actually speaks to Obama’s strengths as an ambassador around the world, etc.” The campaign has typically played down attention to issues of BO being a Muslim, being Black, etc. They handled the MO issue about “pride” pretty well by, well, not saying much at all. But this is an interesting reaction.
The story on the AP wire is about Plouffe’s reaction and Williams’ response. Which gives the story legs, and legitimizes it being announced on MSM outlets. And again, Drudge offers very little evidence of where it actually came from.
I would suspect that in the next 24 hours, we’ll have either an admission of responsibility or a forceful denial from the Clinton campaign. Of course, Drudge could clear the whole thing up quite easily, but this allows both HRC and BO to twist in the wind until then. And this definitely hurts HRC among liberal Dems, and hurts BO among crossover voters.
When I saw the pic on the Drudge site, the first thing that popped into my mind was that he did not look to be comfortable with his appearance in the garb. If it was a calculated move, I saw it is more of a Dukakis-in-the-tank photo, than a Barak-and-Osama dating moment.
Well, yes and no. “Investigating” suggests that there’s a good chance that it did indeed come from their camp. But race has been the third rail in campaigning against Obama, so it might be better to decline to get involved on that level.
Appearance is everything Hippy and I agree, it truly hurts the Clinton Camp because it makes them look like they did it [which we don’t know yet who authorized it] and it hurts the Obama Camp in possibly affecting crossovers. However, HRC’s Camp appears to be in death throes and this will look to some people like a down and dog dirty ploy by the Clinton Camp to subvert Obama’s momentum. It will appear that way to some folks, plain and simple. I do not see this being positive for the Clinton Campaign at all. I see this hurting them in one weeks time.
Phlosphr, you’re exactly right, which is exactly why it makes so little sense for the Clinton campaign to go there. One, the story as currently told points right back to them. Two, even snarky lines like “Xerox” have the press creaming themselves over Hillary’s “negativity.” (I laughed when I saw Slate announce “Watch Hillary go negative” and the linked ad said only that Obama wouldn’t debate in Wisconsin. That’s negative? The press is guaranteed to be uncritical of the Drudge Report (hell, the NYT accused McCain of having an affair with no evidence last week) - so there is no way, IMO, that any official staffer would have gone there. There are better ways to circulate that old photo that don’t have fingers pointing right back at the Clinton campaign, if they were so inclined. And it wasn’t just one embittered person… according to Drudge, it was at least two. So did multiple “stressed” people send him that picture?
One last thing. BO seems to be very conscious of his image. He famously refused to take pictures with Gavin Newsom because of his support for gay marriage (Willie Brown confirms that he did not want to be in the same picture with him, and Newsom stated that the gay marriage support was the issue). He would probably not agree to have the picture taken if he had a political concern about it. It seems a calm dismissal of an old photo showing his embrace of local traditions would be much more in line with BO’s usual way. (Again, not dismissing the “dog whistle” aspect of the photo, but just thinking about how this might have played out differently.)
As an aside & to be fair, the NYT was roundly criticized in the media for that story and not just by the right-wing branches. To the point where the NYT printed an “explanation” as to why they’d run the story.
I don’t see how making some kind of light statement about investigating the matter is akin to admitting responsibility. If Drudge is reporting that the pic came from Clinton staffers, it would be in HRC’s best interest to look as if she’s trying to root out any rogue elements that possibly are act work in her campaign. If she fails to do this, comparisons between her and Rove will be made and for good reason.
(and not too far removed from the truth, eh?)