Clinton campaign starts 5-point attack on Obama
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After struggling for months to dent Senator Barack Obama's candidacy, the campaign of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is now unleashing what one Clinton aide called a "kitchen sink" fusillade against Obama, pursuing five lines of attack since Saturday in hopes of stopping his political momentum.
The effort underscores not only Clinton's recognition that the next round of primaries — in Ohio and Texas on March 4 — are must-win contests for her. It also reflects her advisers' belief that they can persuade many undecided voters to embrace her at the last minute by finally drawing sharply worded, attention-grabbing contrasts with Obama.
After denouncing Obama over the weekend for an anti-Clinton flier about the Nafta trade treaty, and then sarcastically portraying his message of hope Sunday as naïve, Clinton delivered a blistering speech on Monday that compared Obama's lack of foreign policy experience to that of the candidate George W. Bush.
"We've seen the tragic result of having a president who had neither the experience nor the wisdom to manage our foreign policy and safeguard our national security," Clinton said in a speech on foreign policy at George Washington University. "We can't let that happen again."
With a crucial debate on Tuesday night in Ohio, both Clinton's advisers and independent political analysts said that, by going negative against Obama at a time when polls in Texas and Ohio show a tightening race, Clinton risked alienating voters. Clinton has always been more popular with voters when she appeared sympathetic and a fighter; her hard-edged instinct for negative politics has usually turned off the public.
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"There's a general rule in politics: A legitimate distinction which could be effective when drawn early in the campaign often backfires and could seem desperate when it happens in the final hours of a campaign," said Steve McMahon, a Democratic strategist working for neither candidate.
In Clinton's speech Monday, she also portrayed herself as "tested and ready" to be commander in chief, while accusing Obama of believing "that mediation and meetings without preconditions will solve some of the world's most intractable problems." Obama has said he would go further than Clinton to meet with leaders of hostile nations, but he has also said he would prepare for those meetings carefully and would not be blind to the leaders' motives.
On another matter, Clinton's aides criticized Obama on Monday for not distancing himself from outside groups running advertisements that promote his candidacy, a practice that Obama has sometimes criticized. But the attack that received the most pop, on cable television and blogs, came after a photograph of Obama in ceremonial African garb appeared on the Drudge Report, and the item's author, Matt Drudge, claimed that the image was provided by a Clinton staff member.
Obama's campaign manager, David Plouffe, said that the Clinton campaign had "engaged in the most shameful, offensive fear-mongering we've seen from either party." It has not been independently verified that the photograph came from the Clinton campaign.
Clinton's new campaign manager, Maggie Williams, recently appointed to bring a tougher hand to the operation, issued a withering reply, not taking responsibility for the photograph but attacking the Obama campaign for suggesting that the photograph amounted to fear-mongering imagery.
"Enough," Williams's statement began. "If Barack Obama's campaign wants to suggest that a photo of him wearing traditional Somali clothing is divisive, they should be ashamed. Hillary Clinton has worn the traditional clothing of countries she has visited and had those photos published widely."
"This is nothing more than an obvious and transparent attempt to distract from the serious issues confronting our country today and to attempt to create the very divisions they claim to decry," she added. "We will not be distracted."
Clinton advisers said on Monday that the attacks were partly an effort to knock Obama off balance before the debate on Tuesday.
They also said they were also sending a signal to supporters and donors that Clinton was still resolutely fighting to win the presidential nomination, despite news reports in recent days about her dispirited campaign operation and her own somber outlook on the race.
To bolster her case at the George Washington speech, Clinton stood on stage with a half-dozen retired military officials, including General Wesley Clark, who introduced her. "I'm convinced that when the going gets tough, Hillary Clinton will never let America down," Clark said.
Clinton pointed to her time in the Senate and in the White House as the first lady as evidence that she was the candidate who was most knowledgeable and prepared for the presidency.
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