thomas
There are a lot of dems, at the organization/fund raising levels, who have been gearing up towards a Hillary run for a long time. They probably constitute the most formidable political machine in the US now around any candidate. That's Obama's first hurdle and I think it is his biggest. Hillary doesn't have to go at him via negatives beyond the differences between the two of them in experience (and perhaps suggestions that she's tougher...a bit of Thatcher and Golda in her, perhaps). All she really has to do is scoop up control at the party machinery level to create advantage. The Obama threat to her is essentially the threat that the cogs in her machine will shift loyalties over to him because of his compelling charm and his unusual promise.
Re the PR stuff... a fundamental trick when you want to do something naughty is to disguise agency...the front group trick or the "People everywhere are now saying that..." trick. Last week, the Wash Times had a piece suggesting that Hillary's campaign would do dirties to Obama. This week, the WSJ's John Fund plays along...
Quote:Mr. Obama knows that Hillary Clinton is a vulnerable front-runner. But he also knows that her side will haul out the brass knuckles to stop him. "Just a little while ago, he was in Springfield worrying about license-tag fees," is how one Hillary advisor told Newsweek magazine described one of the attack lines that would be used against him. "There's a fine line between an empty suit and an empty vessel into which people want to pour their hopes," says one national political journalist.
He goes on to helpfully recommend that Obama avoid all the pain of such personal attacks that will emanate from Hillary's camp and not bother running at all. He's a very compassionate man, John Fund.
This is fairly benign in itself (though we'll note the complete opacity and potential false impression of "one Hillary advisor"...parse this sentence a certain way and Dick Morris fits the definition) but this is a vector for doing dirty work which (like Foxfyre's cartoon) would work to slime both Hillary and Obama even while the real agency is a malice-intent and greatly invisible third party. We ought to note that Okie forwarded this same vector a couple of weeks past. One would like to know where he bumped into the idea.
