A throwaway line in a Politico piece on this weekend’s RNC âwinter retreatâ for major donors at Los Angelesâ Beverly Wilshire Hotel:
Plenty of lowbrow Hillary Rodham Clinton jokes were tossed around at the three-day event, but of highest concern was the notion of Obama seizing the Oval Office in a contest against presumptive GOP nominee John McCain.
I guess it just goes without saying that Republican officialdom and their fat cat backers toss off “lowbrow” jokes about Clinton, even in a public setting like an official party event.
It’s just a scene-setter: The martinis were ice cold, the greens were lightning fast, the steaks were bloody rare, and, oh, by the way, Hillary is a __________.
What a knee-slapper. Fun times on the GOP side.
We hope to bring you more detailed coverage of the McCain-Obama public financing pledge and Obama’s hedging over the issue now that his proven fund-raising prowess makes the pledge disadvantageous for him. But I couldn’t let this pass without comment.
You may have caught over the weekend the new line of attack on Obama from the Clinton campaign. As USA Today reports, the Clinton campaign “hammered rival Barack Obama on Sunday for refusing to reaffirm his commitment to accept public financing in the general election, a development a top aide criticized as “a pretty big flip-flop” and an opening for Republican attack.”
There are a number of such stories out today. All of them then go on to dutifully note that Sen. Clinton herself has not pledged to take public financing in the general election.
The issue isn’t public financing, the Clinton campaign says, it’s the flip-flop. âThatâs not change you can believe in,â Clinton campaignâs communications director Howard Wolfson said.
Shorter Hillary: I may be wrong, but at least I’m consistent about it.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
The Protect America Act expired Friday night.
So here we sit like ducks. The terrorists are poised to attack.
And the telecoms are unprotected by retroactive immunity.
It’s pretty clear now that the Hillary campaign wasn’t prepared with a Plan B if its strategy for a Super Tuesday knockout punch didn’t work. Now comes a report that the campaign only recently learned that her “firewall” state of Texas allocates delegates in such a way that even a big popular vote win might not yield a decided edge in state delegates.
The Republicans’ best hope in 2008 might just be the maddening debate raging within the Democratic Party over the rules governing super delegates and the seating of delegates from Florida and Michigan. Who’s playing by the rules, who’s trying to change them mid-game, and how might the Democrats find a way to screw up 2008? We explore in today’s Sunday Show Roundup episode of TPMtv …
By now, you’ve probably heard of the new attack line from the Hillary campaign, accusing Obama of plagiarism because an ad-libbed portion of his stump speech mimicked the language and rhythm of a two-year-old speech by his friend and supporter, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick.
Patrick told the New York Times that he and Obama freely exchange speech ideas and that he didn’t feel like a citation was needed.
The Clinton campaign held a conference call this morning to continue pushing this line of attack. TPM Election Central asked campaign adviser Howard Wolfson about Patrick’s remarks:
Wolfson said the plagiarism charge still holds because listeners go in with the assumption that Obama’s speeches are original, unless credit is given. “So I think it’s fine that Deval Patrick said that,” Wolfson said. “But what I’m concerned about is that the public has an expectation that Sen. Obama’s words are his own.”
Wolfson’s concern for the public’s fragile expectations would be quaint if it wasn’t so transparently self-serving. Obviously, this isn’t plagiarism.
But like the flip-flop line of attack Hillary is pressing on Obama’s public financing pledge, the attack speaks to her campaign’s effort to undermine the very thing that has been the centerpiece of Obama’s candidacy: his authenticity.
Sure he gives better speeches than I do, the Hillary line goes, but the words aren’t even his own. He may talk a good game about public financing, she asserts, but when push comes to shove his position is the same as mine.
The attacks are intended to bring down Obama’s positives, to knock him off his pedestal. But it’s hard to see how they raise Hillary’s. Her argument, boiled down, is: “He’s no better than me.” (Or perhaps, less charitably, “He’s just as bad as me.”)
Judged as political rhetoric, it strikes me as equally ineffective as her earlier charge that Obama was “raising false hopes.”
Late Update: Jake Tapper reports on the same conference call I referenced above:
I asked Clinton communications director Howard Wolfson and Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass, if they could assure the public that neither Clinton nor McGovern has ever done what Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, did when he used the rhetoric of Gov. Deval Patrick without footnoting him.
They would not.
In fact, Wolfson seemed to say it wouldn’t be as big a deal if it were discovered that Clinton had “lifted” such language.
“Sen. Clinton is not running on the strength of her rhetoric,” Wolfson said.
Marie Wilson sits down at the Table for One to discuss women in politics.
She starts with the “One and Only” problem.
A federal judge in California has taken the extraordinary step of shutting down the whistleblower site Wikileaks.org.
TPM Reader BC has seen this challenge to authenticity before:
I also find the Clinton “Obama’s no better than me” argument baffling. â¦
It doesn’t make any logical sense, but on the other hand, it seems to be a pretty effective political strategy — it’s been a central part of Republican campaign arguments forever.
“Limousine liberals” disprove the notion that Democrats are uniformly the party of the working class, which means that the Democratic Party’s economic policies must be “inauthentic,” which means (somehow) that Republicans should be given carte blanche to support the rich.
Even the Republican “flip-flopper” attacks against Kerry in 04 were essentially attacks on his authenticity. What did Republicans care that Kerry hadn’t been clear or consistent in his opposition to the war? If anything, this should have reassured them that he wouldn’t “cut and run.” But the real goal was to suggest to voters in the middle that Kerry wasn’t authentic enough about his views to deserve their votes, and they should support the consistent warmonger instead.
There’s an interesting dynamic in play if Barack Obama becomes the Democratic nominee this summer. John McCain has been lying for several years about negotiations he held early in this decade over leaving the Republican party and either joining the Democratic party or, probably more likely, becoming an independent and caucusing with the Democrats as Sen. Jeffords (I-VT) was then doing.
The person who knows most about those discussions is former Sen. Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD). And Daschle is not only a supporter of Obama. He’s played a key role in putting together the team of staffers and campaign operatives who make up Obama’s inner circle.
Daschle has touched on this in the past but pretty lightly. And of course it wasn’t until recently that McCain was running again as Mr. Republican. But I would think that at some point — should Obama become the nominee, and possibly even if Clinton does — Daschle’s role in the campaign and what he knows about McCain will come into some tension.