Democratic Fratricide
I wrote a long post about this on Wednesday, but it appears in their final push for Pennsylvania voters, both the Clinton and Obama campaigns are digging deeper into the mud for slinging at each other.
The Obama campaign has apparently decided that now would be a good time to start pounding Hillary over the Bosnia flap. It isn't. Obama's comments during the debate were the right response. Despite the fact it shows her to be a rather enormous fibber, it isn't a fib about policy. Attack her over her hubby's support of the Columbia Free Trade agreement that she says she opposes. That at least has policy implications.
As stupid a move as I think that is, the Clinton campaign had to go one way the fuck over. Not content with amplifying right-wing talking points or leaping ahead of stories on the justification that, "the Republicans will do it in the fall", the Clinton campaign is now handing out blueprints for the right on how to launch even more devastating smears.
A high-ranking labor supporter of Hillary Clinton is distributing to union leaders and to Democratic strategists a document detailing the radical activities of Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, two former members of the '70s group the Weather Underground, who decades later, in Chicago, crossed paths with Barack Obama.
The document - a three-page emailed essay by Rick Sloan, communications director for the International Association of Machinists as Aerospace Workers (IAMAW) -- takes both literary and political license to outline what Sloan believes would be the thrust of a hypothetical Republican campaign against Obama focusing on his tangential connection to Ayers and Dohrn.
The goal of the essay appears to be to discredit Obama as the prospective Democratic presidential nominee.
Listen, we know the Republicans are going to bring this shit up, but do you really have to game-plan it for them? Honestly, it's getting hard to tell just whose side these guys are on. I'll let Bob Herbert do the conclusion:
The Democrats are doing everything they can to blow this presidential election. This is a skill that comes naturally to the party. There is no such thing as a can’t-miss year for the Democrats. They are truly gifted at finding ways to lose.
. . .
That’s been it for the party for the past 40 years. The Democrats have become so psychologically battered by these many decades in the leadership wilderness that they consider the Clinton years, during which the president was impeached and they lost control of both houses of Congress, to have been a period of triumph.
Now comes 2008, a can’t-lose year if there ever was one. A united Democratic Party should be able to win this election in a walk. The economy is terrible and getting worse. The Republicans are demoralized. John McCain is no J.F.K. And the country wants to elect a Democrat.
So what are the Democrats doing? The Clintons are running around with flamethrowers, gleefully trying to incinerate the prospects of the party’s leading candidate, Barack Obama. As Bill Clinton put it last month: “If a politician doesn’t want to get beat up, he shouldn’t run for office.”
. . .
Voters across the country seem disgusted with this state of affairs. George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson of ABC News are being pilloried for the way they conducted Wednesday’s debate. Hillary Clinton’s disapproval ratings have climbed into a zone that makes it legitimate to wonder whether she could defeat Senator McCain. And much of the excitement and enthusiasm surrounding Mr. Obama’s candidacy has cooled.
That raucous laughter you hear in the background is coming from the likes of Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, President Bush and Senator McCain. They can’t believe their good fortune.
Maybe they can pull themselves out of this spiral. The results on Tuesday will tell us more, but if the campaign goes on much longer, the Democratic Party and their candidate will be a gutted out husk before the Republicans even get started on them.
