The Daily Background

I think we’re starting to see a pattern here in terms of how the Clinton campaign operates. It’s clear that they’re very worried about Obama overtaking them, and I think we’re starting to see how they react. It’s not pretty.

Early on, we saw that the Clinton campaign had a tendency to over-react to the slightest thing. When one of Obama’s donors, David Geffin (who used to be a big Clinton fundraiser) said that Clinton lies with such ease it’s troubling, Clinton’s campaign sent out all kinds of inaccurate press releases which claimed Geffen was an official in Obama’s campaign (which he wasn’t at all), and calling on Obama to fire him and denounce what he said. Obama was as surprised as everyone else, and stated the obvious: there was no reason for him to apologize for what some random person who happens to support him said. ““You know, it’s not clear to me,” he said. “Why would I be apologizing for someone else’s remarks?”

Now the Clinton camp is on the attack again, calling Obama “naive” and attacking him for things that she’s done herself, such as talking about how she’d try to track down Osama bin Laden in a different way than Bush has failed to.

She’s even gone to the extent to suggest that Obama is endangering national security, or at least compromising the chance that we can catch him because he said he wants to work more closely with Pakistan. She called him a hypocite (”What ever happened to the politics of hope?”) because he dared compare her foreign policy position to a watered down version of the Bush Administration’s.

Oh, and she also said it was naive to say that he had no plans to nuke anyone. That’s pretty much the last straw to me.

It’s pretty clear that the Clinton campaign has learned from the relentless right-wing attacks that President Clinton suffered through in the 1990s, and that they’re eager to attack Obama over anything– whether it makes sense or not. I think they’re feeling threatened, and they think it’s open season now that the two candidates have had their first issues-based spat. They’re eager to brawl and they’re jumping at any opportunity they see, whether it’s a legitimate opportunity or not.

Ironically, this comes just as a key advisor of Clinton’s admits that they made a mistake in going after Obama so angrily, impulsively and unfoundedly over Geffen’s remarks in February.

The Clinton campaign doesn’t admit a mistake easily — just ask Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., who continues to refuse to apologize for her vote on the Iraq war.
[…]
“I don’t think that played out very well,” Penn is quoted as saying. “It’s important in politics not to make the same mistake too many times. If we had that one to do over again we would probably approach it differently.”
[…]
After the article, Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson rushed out an email demanding Obama denounce the remarks of Geffen, “his campaign’s finance chair.” Wolfson wrote “If Senator Obama is indeed sincere about his repeated claims to change the tone of our politics, he should immediately denounce these remarks, remove Mr. Geffen from his campaign and return his money,”

Geffen was not Obama’s finance chair, and according to Obama’s campaign held no official role in the campaign. Obama himself said, “It’s not clear to me why I’d be apologizing for someone else’s remark,” followed by Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs saying: “The Clintons had no problem with David Geffen when [he] was raising them $18 million and sleeping at their invitation in the Lincoln bedroom.”

C’mon, Clinton campaign. Learn from your mistakes. Don’t drag this into the mudpit. You guys over-reacted to the Geffen remark, you guys over-reacted to Obama disagreeing with Clinton over foreign policy in the YouTube debate, and she’s just firing blindly now. You’re going to look at this as a mistake in six months. It’s not too late to turn the volume back down.

Filed under: Z-TDB Blog