On the Craptacular ABC “Debate” and Clinton’s Whining
While some polls have Obama keeping even with or even gaining a little on Clinton after the ABC “debate,” many polls–especially Gallup’s tracking poll–show Obama losing ground. Little wonder, considering how the debate seemed designed to tear Obama apart and allow Hillary to pile on and look better at the same time.
Some might disagree that the ABC fiasco was “designed” to do that, but look at some of the evidence that is piling up. Aside from the fact that George Stephanopoulos, a former Clinton official, literally took notes from right-winger Sean Hannity on how to smear Obama with irrelevancies, there is now proof that ABC actually sought out an anti-Obama Pennsylvanian woman who has been featured before in the press as being obsessed with Obama’s lack of flag lapel pins.
Clinton is following this up with a new strategy: despite Obama’s classy “you just gotta brush these things off” reaction to the attacks, Clinton is now labeling Obama as a “whiner.” As if somehow, she and her media allies can ruthlessly smear Obama, and if he rebuts–which is universally agreed upon as a necessary response to such attacks (and which Clinton has done before herself)–then he’s a “whiner.”
But since rebutting is whining in Clinton’s book, then surely she will have no reaction to yet another witness to Clinton’s disrespectful 1995 remarks about voters. Theda Skocpol was there when Hillary reportedly told Bill to screw the voters (insert your own Bill Clinton joke here), and while she can’t confirm or deny any exact words, she did get this directly from the notes she took that day:
… there was extensive, hard-nosed discussion about why masses of voters did not support Clinton or trust government or base their choices on economic as opposed to what people saw as peripheral life-style concerns. Hillary Clinton was among the most cold-blooded analysts in attendance. She spoke of ordinary voters as if they were a species apart, and showed interest only in the political usefulness of their choices — usefulness to the Clinton administration, that is.
In other words, she cares.
Obama, I think, is going to have to put Hillary on the defensive. I think he can do that without getting to mudslinging. There’s lots of stuff out there. Like her lying about Tuzla and NAFTA-gate, and her acts of desperation etc…
If he puts her on the defensive, maybe the media will go for it, like any shiny object that moves, and force her to have to explain herself. Any time she’s having to defend and explain herself, is time that she has spent not flinging mud at Obama. And I think it’s important to keep her from saying things that McCain could use in the fall.