Barack Obama is hoping that the people in Iowa don’t look at the two conflicting messages he is putting out and start wondering what kind of person he is. On the one hand, you have a person who is out there delivering this pretty speech on hope and political change. On the other, he is a person who has a 527 group out there called Vote Hope, http://www.votehope2008.com that is running ads in his favor even though he is not in favor of 527 ads.
So far, that is fine and understandable because a candidate cannot control what independent groups like 527s do, but then he is out there criticizing Hillary Clinton and John Edwards for having 527 groups running ads in their favor. Edwards has also asked 527 groups not to run ads on his behalf.
A week ago, according to this article in the Los Angeles Times, http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-dems23dec23,1,4586681.story?track=rss Obama and his chief strategist issued this pointed attack on Edwards:
"You can't say yesterday you don't believe in them, and today you have three-quarters of a million dollars being spent for you," Obama said… David Axelrod, Obama's chief strategist, said the 527 group known as Alliance for a New America just bought $756,000 worth of airtime to run ads in Iowa from Wednesday to Jan. 3, the date of the caucuses
Yesterday, the Washington Post’s Chris Cilliza wrote this article, http://blog.washingtonpost.com/thefix/2007/12/obama_and_outside_money.html , which discusses an Obama campaign memo to the press that has more attacks on Edwards regarding 527s and has attacks on Hillary Clinton for her 527 groups.
Neither Obama nor Axelrod or anyone else in the Obama campaign has mentioned the 527 group Vote Hope raising and spending money on Obama’s behalf. I wonder how Iowans would feel if they knew about that. I look at it and say, this person is not only not interested in political change; he is embracing the worst of the worst in contemporary political campaign hypocrisy and rhetoric.
Obama flubbed the initial response to the Bhutto Assassination raising questions on Presidential Readiness
The initial knock on Obama was that he didn’t have enough foreign policy experience to be President. Hillary Clinton made a particularly telling blow earlier on in the campaign when she referred to Obama as being naïve after he made an embarrassing comment on an international issue. If you have that perception out there, the last thing you want to do is confirm the naïve perception again but that is exactly what happened with Obama’s initial response to the assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.
Instead of contacting Pakistani officials and offering condolences or making comments consoling the people of Pakistan or even expressing concern about the political situation there, Obama’s reaction was to attack Hillary Clinton and her Iraq war vote as shown in this article in the Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/27/AR2007122702514.html . At a campaign stop, the post quotes Obama as saying, "I've been saying for some time that we've got a very big problem" in Pakistan, Obama said. "We were distracted from focusing on them.” The same Post article has Obama not offering any remotely Presidential reaction for over 24 hours after the assassination, long after Edwards had spoken with Musharraf and expressed concern for the democratic process in Pakistan.
A disturbing picture of Obama is starting to emerge in these last few weeks leading up to the Iowa caucuses. Obama appears to be a man who after many months on the campaign trail and doubtless dozens of briefings and coaching by experts on foreign policy cannot come up with a timely and appropriate response to a foreign policy crisis. In terms of integrity and change, Obama’s hypocritical attacks regarding 527 groups reminds me of the kinds of things that came out of the 2000 and 2004 Bush campaigns. Those are not the kinds of things I want coming out of someone who hopes to represent my party or me.
