My little politics blog

That idea - about Bill's predominance in her campaign foreshadowing how much he might influence her administration - really jumped out at me the first time I heard it the other day. It was one of those things that's right there, but I hadn't considered it. Who can deny that the man's ego blurs even his own judgement, and let run amok, could very well taint things writ large?

If people including the Clintons "are making false assertions," [Obama] said, he will aggressively set the record straight.

As for the campaign's overall tone, Obama said, "I don't feel like the candidates are getting bloodied up. This is good practice for me, so when I take on those Republicans I'll be accustomed to it."

I write this more out of sadness than anger. Bill Clinton's ill-tempered and ill-founded attacks on Barack Obama are doing no credit to the former President, his legacy, or his wife's campaign. Nor are they helping the Democratic party. While it may be that all is fair in love, war, and politics, it's not fair - indeed, it's demeaning - for a former President to say things that are patently untrue (such as Obama's anti-war position is a "fairy tale") or to insinuate that Obama is injecting race into the race when the former President is himself doing it. Meanwhile, the attack ads being run in South Carolina by the Clinton camp which quote Obama as saying Republicans had all the ideas under Reagan, is disingenuous. For years, Bill Clinton and many other leading Democrats have made precisely the same point - that starting in the Reagan administration, Republicans put forth a range of new ideas while the Democrats sat on their hands. Many of these ideas were wrong-headed and dangerous, such as supply-side economics. But for too long Democrats failed counter with new ideas of their own; they wrongly assumed that the old Democratic positions and visions would be enough. Clinton's 1992 campaign - indeed, the entire "New Democratic" message of the 1990s - was premised on the importance of taking back the initiative from the Republicans and offering Americans a new set of ideas and principles. Now, sadly, we're witnessing a smear campaign against Obama that employs some of the worst aspects of the old politics.

Is Obama winning the spin war?

Greg Sargent thinks so. I think the spin war itself is a distraction from Obama's core message - of unifying change - and distracting from that is central to the Clintons' strategy. It seems to me that Obama needs to focus back on the case for his own candidacy, in particular, providing explicit concrete policy detail in his public presentation. The Clintons are running as prosaic general managers. Obama should not downplay his transformational potential or his broader themes. But in the battle for base voters, many people are not hearing specifics - on the economy, on healthcare, on taxes, on climate change. He has them. He needs to repeat them. With the same mind-numbing repetitiveness that the Clintons always deploy.

Peter Wehner served in the Bush White House until August, 2007, working for Karl Rove, the Administration's chief strategist. Wehner, who is now a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, in Washington, said that, as a candidate, Hillary Clinton would provide a "much more target-rich environment" than Obama. Republicans wouldn't need to uncover new scandals; they would simply remind voters of the not so distant Clinton wars. "Certain regions of your brain are latent," Wehner said. "But if there's a word or a sound or a memory that you hear, that region of your brain lights up again. And I have a feeling that, with Bill and Hillary Clinton, there are latent regions of the brain that will light up, and, if the Democrats don't light it up, the Republicans will. And that is going to be Clinton fatigue." As for Obama, Wehner's only complaint is that he's a liberal: "I find him to be very impressive. He would be much more difficult for Republicans to handle. He has much more breakout potential."

A former Clinton Administration official explained his decision to support Obama by urging me to read the two candidates' autobiographies side by side. Obama's "Dreams from My Father," unlike Clinton's "Living History," he said, reveals a narrator who has struggled through difficult questions of identity and resolved them, and who, as a result, is comfortable not just with himself but with the complexity and contradiction of the world. "When I'm with her, I feel she wants to impress me," the former official said. "When I'm with him, I feel he wants to know what I have to offer him."

Pietrafesa said that Hillary's fear of public exposure was connected to those early years in Arkansas. "To be so humiliated, and ruthlessly," Pietrafesa said. "In Arkansas, she went to a place she wasn't welcomed, big time. Everything was wrong with her. She didn't paint her toenails when she wore sandals, she didn't look like a cocktail waitress when she dressed up. Everybody really felt they could insult her with impunity."

A few hours before Clinton's rally in Hampton, I watched John McCain's masterly presentation before a packed middle-school gym in Salem, which included many skeptics and independents. An accountant challenged him on his willingness to make Bush's tax cuts permanent while claiming to be a deficit hawk, telling McCain, "You're in Purgatory." The candidate shot back playfully, "Thank you very much. It's a step up from where I was last summer." He was witty, combative, humble, and blunt (while embracing Republican orthodoxy on almost every position). Unlike Clinton, he engaged questioners in lengthy back-and-forths that showed he was capable of a respectful disagreement. After hearing Clinton that evening, I thought that she might have a hard time beating McCain in November.

"Hillary needs to connect two things," Myers said. "What's in her heart and what she wants to accomplish and why. There are many reasons to think she'd be a good President. She knows what she wants to do, she understands how the process works, she's shown an ability to work with Congress, she's become more incrementalist. But the Presidency isn't all that powerful, except as the bully pulpit. It comes down to your ability to get people to follow you, to inspire. You have to lead. Can she get people to come together, or does she remain such a polarizing figure? That's what the campaign will be about." In other words, winning the Presidency might require Clinton to transcend her own history.

But when candidates tell the kinds of lies that the Clintons have been telling, they place citizens in a position in which the only way to know what is going on is to become political junkies. Being merely informed is not enough: you have to be the sort of person who actually remembers the article from 2004 that Bill Clinton was referring to when he said that Obama had changed his position on the war, and so forth.

It's like the tobacco companies' attempts to confuse people by coming up with research that seemed to show that smoking was harmless. The strategy is to sow enough doubt that people who are not willing to slog through the science, the interminable debates about the methodological deficiencies of this or that study, etc., etc., etc., are likely to come away with a vague sense that the case that smoking is bad isn't all it's cracked up to be. It is designed to leave people with two options: either spend an awful lot of time working through the science, or be misled. In so doing, it asks a lot of ordinary people who have lives to lead: it prevents them from just reading stuff, forming a more or less correct view, and acting accordingly. And it is deeply wrong.

Likewise here: the Clintons' strategy seems to be designed to leave people with two options: either become political junkies, follow every tiny detail of all these stories, and make up your minds on the merits, or not, in which case you will be left with a vague sense that Obama is not all he should be -- a sense that is wholly unsupported by the facts.

This is also sort of what I was getting at in the "polls" thread about "safer." It's not about intelligence per se (and I was uncomfortable with where Cycloptichorn was going, there), but how much patience people have to wade through stuff vs. going the safer route.

Very, very good (post? article? column?) from Hilzoy, again (the fishin'-avatar-guy).

http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2008/01/lies-and-democr.html

It has a really good collection of debunkings, along with analysis. I thought this was particularly good/ well-stated:


Hilzoy adds later:

Quote:

All I want to say is if Hillary gets the nomination, the democrats will lose the election. I just want the Clintons to go away, they had their turn and it is time for somebody new

Also I am disgusted that an ex-president is campaigning this way, generally they deserve respect but Bill Clinton is changing that, he does not have my respect.

I couldn't agree more, especially the last part.

That wasn't about identity politics, it was that it was swerving close to "poor people are stupid."

I'll go into it more there, though.

Republican perspective, interesting in a few different ways; "Where is the Republican Obama?"

http://www.forbes.com/opinions/2008/01/25/james-republican-obama-oped-cx_pja_0125james.html