David Axelrod may no longer work in the White House, but he’s still willing to go to the mat for his old boss.
The former senior White House adviser and close confidant to President Obama proved as much on Tuesday with a jab at Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy record.
“Just to clarify: ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ means stuff like occupying Iraq in the first place, which was a tragically bad decision,” Axelrod tweeted.
Just to clarify: "Don't do stupid stuff" means stuff like occupying Iraq in the first place, which was a tragically bad decision.
— David Axelrod (@davidaxelrod) August 12, 2014
The tweet was a response to Clinton’s recent interview with The Atlantic, in which the former secretary of state criticized the Obama administration’s foreign policy maxim.
“Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle,” Clinton told Jeffrey Goldberg.
The back-and-forth has echoes of the tense 2008 Democratic primary battle between Clinton and Obama — and Axelrod’s tweet highlighted what was perhaps the deciding issue of that campaign.
Obama’s opposition to the Iraq War as an Illinois state senator appealed to many Democratic voters and allowed him to distinguish himself from Clinton, who voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq.
Axelrod did not respond to TPM’s request for comment.
Earlier this year, he urged Democratic donors to focus on the 2014 midterms rather than the 2016 presidential race in what was perceived by many as a shot at Clinton. But Axelrod insisted that wasn’t the case.
“It’s not about Hillary, who probably wishes-or should-that a lot of this activity would just stop for now,” Axelrod told TPM in an email in February. “But Democrats face a very serious challenge in ’14, and if they cede the terrain to the Koch Brothers in service of ’16, they put Senate at risk.”
“Throws shade at”?
I know I’m not one of the new young hip-hop cats but am I supposed to recognize that?
Steeziest headline evah.
Sounds like a hip/hop headline…
People REALLY need to calm down about this. Hillary and Obama differed on how to respond in Syria. We already knew that. It’s part of the game for her to stake out her own ground as she (obviously) preps her own run for the White House.
This doesn’t mean that they’re enemies. It doesn’t mean the party is fracturing. It doesn’t mean Hillary is a dangerous neocon – she agrees with the great majority of Obama’s foreign policy, and has readily admitted that her vote in favor of the Iraq invasion was based on false information. (Kerry, who nobody is suggesting is an enemy of the President’s foreign policy, voted the same way for the same reasons.)
Nor does this mean that the entire political landscape has changed and that the youth vote now belongs to Rand Paul (little problems like his view that segregation should have been left to the states, or dismantling social security and medicare might just attract notice in a campaign).
The “whatever just happened is the most important thing that will ever happen” approach of today’s click-driven media should not delude everyone else. Take a longer view, people… don’t just fall for the overhyped “game changer of the day.”
Hillary should be dinged for her vote, and her comments suggest she doesn’t really regret it. Also? I think the media is hyping this into something the original interview wasn’t. She said a lot more that provided context for the original remark, and that context makes clear that she wasn’t slamming Obama at all.
But “Hillary Clinton slams Obama” is just so much more sexy…