Hillary Clinton's Tactics in Ohio and Texas Show Why She is Karl Rove's Favorite Democrat
When I first saw Hillary's 3 am Red Phone ad, I know I had seen something like this before. Hillary's ad is the fear mongering grandchild of Lyndon Johnson's infamous atomic fireball spouting Daisy ad, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKs-bTL-pRg which itself spawned more subtle copycats like Walter Mondale's 1984 Red Phone Ad. Here are Hillary Clinton and Walter Mondale's Red Phone Ad back to back followed by commentary from Barack Obama http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CFb_KCbI2w
Hillary touts herself as the heir of the Clinton political movement started by her husband in the 1990s, but she is decidedly the opposite of the best of for what Bill Clinton represented as one can clearly see in this 2004 speech given by the former President http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGW38Zy4bJo where he said:
"One of Clinton's laws of politics are this. If one candidate is trying to scare you and one is trying to get you to think, if one candidate is appealing to your fears and the other one is appealing to your hopes, you better vote for the person who wants you to Think and Hope, that's the best."
Who would have known that in 2004 Bill Clinton was getting in an early endorsement for Barack Obama?
The point is that the Democratic Party is not the party of fear mongering. It is not the politics of lies, or Karl Rove campaign tactics. Unfortunately, someone forgot to tell that to Hillary Clinton and her campaign.
The Clinton campaign "somehow" obtained a memo written by a single member of the Canadian Consulate in Chicago where purportedly, it describes the meeting between a member of the Obama campaign and Consulate officials where the Obama representative told Canadian officials "not to worry about what Obama was saying on NAFTA because 'he didn't really mean it' "
If you are a student of politics and political history, you learn to quickly smell out campaign lies like this one that the Clinton campaign has fed the Associated Press and other news outlets. First of all, the timing is too perfect. It comes two days before a critical set of primaries where it is just in time to do damage to Obama, and there is not enough time to properly analyze the veracity or do a proper vetting of the reports. Second, the issue just happens to be regarding Clinton's weakest issue in Ohio and Obama's strongest. Obama has been a consistent critic of unrestricted Free Trade, while Hillary has been a cheerleader for NAFTA and other Free trade accords for years until a few weeks into the primary season when she started slowly backing away from that support. This difference between the two candidates is one of the reasons union support for Obama has been so strong. Third, while one low ranking member of the consulate is pushing the Clinton version of events, the Obama campaign and the Canadian embassy denied there was any inconsistency between what the candidate was saying publicly and what advisers were saying privately. Game, set and match.
This all follows on a February where the Clinton campaign set a furious pace in trying to throw mud at Obama. I wrote this article http://www.opednews.com/articles/2/opedne_steven_l_080218_hillary_clinton___de.htm where I described three separate attacks on Obama that have been completely debunked to the point where the Clinton people have even given up on trying to raise those issues, and another that will go away in a few weeks and show that in that situation, Obama did nothing wrong (Rezko).
Now, you would think that after suffering through Whitewater, Kathleen Willey, Genifer Flowers and Monica Lewinsky that the Clintons would have decided that these were the kinds of things that no one should have to deal with. It is sad that they have embraced the same kind of tactics that caused Hillary herself to coin the phrase Vast Right Wing Conspiracy.
The worst part of this all for both candidates and the Democratic Party is that Hillary's tactics are destroying the electability of both candidates. I have been following the positive and negative ratings of all candidates from both parties. For the first time, after having a negative rating in the 20's for most of the primary season, Barack Obama's negative/dislike rating among voters has hit 35%. That is a sad statistic, but what Hillary's attacks have done to her own negative/dislike rating is even more dramatic. I used to say about Hillary that she had a negative/dislike percentage rating in the high 40s and with that she was virtually unelectable. Well, her negative/dislike/unfavorable rating now stands at 52%. At 52% vs. a John McCain who has a negative/dislike rating in the mid 30s she is completely unelectable. She has no chance. She would probably win less than ten states and get less than 40% of the vote. You would see states turn red that have not turned red in over 20 years.
This is what I was afraid of when I started looking at Hillary Clinton seriously as a potential candidate. I have said this time and time again in articles I have written on the subject. In order to try to win she has to wage the most negative campaign in the history of American politics because you cannot compete with a 52% unfavorable rating against likeable people whose negative ratings are in the 30s and 20s. Attempting to win campaigns by lies, mudslinging and appealing to the lowest common denominator is not what I am about. This is not what I thought the Democratic Party was about. Hillary should have pulled out of the race after the February 5th super Tuesday shellacking that she received. All that she has done since that day was tear down herself and Obama and put the Democrat's chance to win back the White House in jeopardy.
