The whole what-Obama-said-in-Kindergarten thing is really oddness abounding... and it's certainly backfired. I must have read about it in a dozen places now, and without exception the reaction was one of scathing ridicule towards Hillary. Definitely a wrong move.
That said - it was a really grasping demonstration of incredible pettiness on the part of the Clinton camp - but am I the only one who
can actually imagine what they were trying to point out? I mean, Obama - we're talking the guy here who, just last month, was high-mindedly postulating,
"I am not in this race to fulfill some long-held ambitions or because I believe it's somehow owed to me. I never expected to be here, I always knew this journey was improbable. [..] I am running in this race because of what Dr. King called "the fierce urgency of now." Because I believe that there's such a thing as being too late. And that hour is almost upon us."
It was a barely veiled attack against she whose name could not be mentioned. Hillary, the hardly concealed implication was, is in the race merely for reasons of personal ambition, to fulfil some long-standing plan of personal success. This dug directly at the wingnut theories that have long entered a kind of public semi-awareness about the Clinton couple's supposed long-standing plot for successive power. Obama, on the other hand, he's above that, he seems to be saying here - he's clean, he's in the race out of a more worthy calling, a Dr. King kind of calling, "the fierce urgency of now".
Now Hillary's campaign was being spitefully petty digging up "dirt" about primary school papers, of all things, so it ended up just looking desperate. But to take up the role of devil's advocate here, I can see the holier-than-thou streak of Obama's that they were so annoyed about and ended up trying to lash out at.
In reality, as Blatham I think has repeatedly pointed out when defending Hillary, it takes a degree of personal ambition for anyone to even enter the slug of a political career that extents even to the long haul of a presidential race - there's noone who manages that purely through idealism. Blatham did have a point that the attacks against Hillary as somehow being specifically "driven by ambition" were at the least exaggerated; unfair to the extent that, of course, in the end they all are. The papers showing Obama the ten-year old (or whatever it was) declaring he wanted to be president neatly underscored that, so I can actually see how they got into the temptation of using it to slam back at him on this count.
It's just mystifying that the idea wasnt shot down in time by a more level-headed mind in the campaign.
