From the AP:
During a series of satellite television interviews, [Hillary] Clinton was questioned by Dallas station KTVT about comments by Adelfa Callejo, a local activist who supports Clinton candidacy. The interviewer quoted Callejo as saying “Obama’s problem is he happens to be black” and asked Clinton to respond.
“Well obviously I want all of us judged on our merits,” Clinton said. “I believe strongly that the fact we have an African American and a woman running for the Democratic nomination is historical and I’m very, very proud of that.”
“I want people though to look beyond, look beyond race and gender, look at our records, look at what we stand for, look at what we’ve done and I think that’s what most voters are looking for,” she said.
The interviewer asked Clinton whether she rejected or denounced Callejo’s comment.
“People have every reason to express their opinions, I just don’t agree with that,” she said, adding “You know, this is a free country. People get to express their opinions.”
Late Update: According to the Dallas Morning News, the Clinton campaign later issued a statement: “After confirming that they were accurately portrayed, Senator Clinton, of course, denounces and rejects them.”
McClatchy: “Iraq’s three-man presidency council Wednesday announced that it’s vetoed legislation that U.S. officials two weeks ago hailed as significant political progress.”
Hopefully, everyone can now see the McCain strategy for running against Barack Obama. Yes, we have some general points on taxes, culture wars and McCain as war hero who can protect us in ways that flash-in-the-pan pretty boy Barack Obama can’t.
But that’s not the core. The core is to drill a handful of key adjectives into the public mind about Barack Obama: Muslim, anti-American, BLACK, terrorist, Arab. Maybe a little hustler and shifty thrown in, but we’ll have to see. The details and specific arguments are sort of beside the point. They’re like the libretto in a Wagner opera, nice for some narrative structure. But it’s the score that’s the real essence of it, the point of the whole exercise.
Now, a good deal has been made out of John McCain’s repudiation of talk radio yakmeister Bill Cunningham, who led off for McCain at one of his rallies with the full run of Obama sludge. But don’t be distracted or fooled. This is more like an example of what the digital commerce folks refer to as ‘channel conflict’. You’ve got your multiple distribution channels. You’ve got the way McCain’s selling the product. Broadcast. Broad and thematic about McCain. But you’ve got a number of other product channels to sell through, most of them a lot grittier, but no less essential for ultimate success.
Both can work simultaneously. In fact, in the kind of campaign McCain’s running, they’re both essential for success (see the 2000 Republican presidential primary in South Carolina). The key is just that the channels don’t cross. Because that’s when the trouble starts and they can begin to undermine or even short-circuit each other. And that’s what threatened to happened here.
Don’t insult your intelligence or mine by pretending that John McCain’s plan for this race doesn’t rely on hundreds of Cunninghams — large and small — across the country, and the RNC and all the GOP third party groups, to be peddling this stuff nonstop for the next eight months because it’s the only way John McCain have a real shot at contesting this race.
If McCain really wants to repudiate this stuff, he can start with the Tennessee Republican party which dished all the slurs and smears about Obama being a Nation of Islam-loving anti-Semite, just today. And once he’s done talking to the people who will be running his Tennessee campaign, we’ll have a number of others he can talk to, like the head of his Ohio campaign, former Sen. Mike DeWine, who gave that Cunningham guy his marching orders.
Let’s just not fool ourselves, not lie to ourselves about what’s happening here and who’s in charge.
Late Update: A few insightful readers have noted that Wagner is perhaps not the best illustration of my libretto to score metaphor since Wagner is one of the few major composers — I’m actually not sure there are any others — to write his own libretti. Perhaps my blind spot is a product of my listening to Wagner without knowing German. In any case, I think my general point remains valid. Perhaps I should have picked on Verdi. But for me nothing — nothing in opera at least — compares to Wagner.
Will Tim Russert denounce longtime supporter Don Imus? Rejecting we can leave for another day.
Earlier today at TPM Election Central, Eric Kleefeld wrote about a scurrilous press release from the Tennessee Republican Party that used innuendo and faulty causation to try to link Obama with anti-semitism.
As a bonus the press release featured the now-notorious photo of Obama in Somali tribal garb from a 2006 congressional trip to Kenya — and referred to him as Barack Hussein Obama.
Ben Smith Jonathan Martin at The Politico is now reporting that the Republican National Committee has “warned” the Tennessee GOP about using “Hussein” in the press release:
The Republican National Committee this afternoon scolded the Tennessee Republican Party over their use of “Barack Hussein Obama” in an official press release and warned the state party that they will be denounced by the national committee if they use the Democrat’s middle name again, said a GOP official close to the RNC.
“The RNC has notified the Tennessee GOP that they do not support or agree with their approach,” said this source, requesting anonymity to discuss the private conversation between a staffer in the national committee’s political department and a top aide at the state party. “If they don’t refrain from doing so again, they will be publicly repudiated by the Republican National Committee.”
This source said the national committee did not ask the Tennessee party to retract their statement, but effectively put them on notice for the future.
Pretty stiff stuff. I mean, you can associate Obama with Louis Farrakhan and anti-semitism, you can repeat garbage from Farrakhan and make it look like Obama approves of it, and you can cast all sorts of other aspersions about Obama, but use “Hussein” and you’ve crossed some invisible line drawn by the RNC (which it will enforce with anonymous hand-wringing and ineffectual warnings).
Sure enough, the press release is still up, stripped of the Hussein reference (we captured a portion of the earlier version, with Hussein intact). The author of the press release was state communications director Bill Hobbs. Ironically, Hobbs apparently missed the sarcasm in Josh’s satirical post below about these attempts to smear Obama, and late today he was approvingly citing it in a post on his own blog.
Meanwhile, the McCain campaign says their candidate condemned the press release and apologized to Obama, Smith Martin reports. But, really, what’s the McCain camp to do? “There will be times in this campaign where people do and say stupid things,” a spokesperson told The Politico. “It’s a fact and it’s beyond our control.”
As Josh notes, we’ll be hearing a lot of that over the next nine months.
Late Update: There’s now a new version of the press release posted, with the following “clarification” (via Jake Tapper):
*Clarification: This release originally referenced a photo of Sen. Obama and incorrectly termed it to be ââMuslimâ garb. It is, in fact, Somali tribal garb, hence, we have deleted the photo. Also, in order to diffuse attempts by Democrats and the Left to divert attention from the main point of this release – that Sen. Obama has surrounded himself with advisers and recieved endorsements from people who are anti-Semitic and anti-Israel – we have deleted the use of Barack Obamaâs middle name.
Canada’s CTV reports:
Within the last month, a top staff member for Obama’s campaign telephoned Michael Wilson, Canada’s ambassador to the United States, and warned him that Obama would speak out against NAFTA, according to Canadian sources.
The staff member reassured Wilson that the criticisms would only be campaign rhetoric, and should not be taken at face value.
But Tuesday night in Ohio, where NAFTA is blamed for massive job losses, Obama said he would tell Canada and Mexico “that we will opt out unless we renegotiate the core labour and environmental standards.”
Late Wednesday, a spokesperson for the Obama campaign said the staff member’s warning to Wilson sounded implausible, but did not deny that contact had been made.
“Senator Obama does not make promises he doesn’t intend to keep,” the spokesperson said.
Low-level sources also suggested the Clinton campaign may have given a similar warning to Ottawa, but a Clinton spokesperson flatly denied the claim.
Late Update: Here’s the video of the report.
GOP leadership aides on the Hill are grumbling that their party isnât getting more political money from the telecoms — even after all they’ve done on telecom immunity. Those ingrates.
TPM Reader ER …
In your piece about the tennesse RNC emphasizing the Hussein in Barack Obama’s name, I believe you have missed an important dynamic. When Mr. Cunningham made his statements, John McCain was lauded for denouncing said remarks. Now everyone is squawking about the “Hussein” and John McCain and the National Republicans don’t have to soil their hands with the proxy grade-school name-calling campaign. I predict a pattern will develop, local and state level Republican operatives will repeatedly emphasize the “Hussein” only to be chastised by more powerful GOP who would like to appear more temperate while amplifying the message. The media will be unable to resist the he said she said middle school dynamic and the chattering class will do the heavy lifting for the GOP. As a side benefit, those localities where race baiting plays well with the electorate will this sort of name-calling will energize the base, so they will be the primary source of such utterances.
This is part of it too. It’s all part of the same game. The one McCain is playing.
Fox News falsely claims that Weatherman Bill Ayers was Obama’s “mentor” and a “principal” in his first campaign.