The Daily Background

With all the negativity that’s been coming from the Clinton campaign in public, one wonders how negative they’re acting behind closed doors while wooing superdelegates. A few reports give us an answer.

Apparently they bring up Reverend Wright a lot.

In an interview with me this morning, senior Hillary adviser Harold Ickes confirmed that Reverend Jeremiah Wright is a key topic in discussions with uncommitted super-delegates over whether Obama is electable in a general election.

The comments from Ickes, who is Hillary’s chief delegate hunter, are to my knowledge the first on-the-record confirmation from a Hillary adviser that the Wright controversy is a subject in conversations between the Hillary campaign and the super-delegates her advisers are trying to win over to Hillary’s side.
[…]
Asked whether he was specifically bringing up Wright to super-delegates, Ickes said: “I’ve said what I’ve said…I tell people that they need to look at what they think Republicans may use against him. Wright comes up in the conversations.”

And they also say that Obama is straight up un-electable, something that Obama has never tried to argue against Clinton:

Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., and former President Bill Clinton are making very direct arguments to Democratic superdelegates, starkly insisting Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., cannot win a general election against presumptive Republican nominee, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.

Sources with direct knowledge of the conversation between Sen. Clinton and Gov. Bill Richardson, D-N.M., prior to the Governor’s endorsement of Obama say she told him flatly, “He cannot win, Bill. He cannot win.”

Richardson, who served in President Clinton’s cabinet, disagreed.

Well no shit he disagreed. Here’s a question though: If things get even more desperate for them, will the Clinton campaign start to volley these arguments against Obama in public as part of their kitchen sink strategy?

Filed under: Z-TDB Blog