It’s getting hard to keep up with the Clinton outrages these days. (I’ll leave Bill Clinton deciding to praise Obama as ‘articulate’ alone for now, as — perhaps — that was just a poor choice of words.) As telegraphed by their moves after Michigan, the Clinton campaign is now explicitly trying to change the rules and get the Michigan and Florida delegates seated (a move which has brought Bill Nelson into the Clinton camp.) Says TPM’s Josh Marshall: “[Y]ou don’t change the rules in midstream to favor one candidate or another. This is no more than a replay, with different factual particulars, of the attempt to outlaw the at-large caucuses in Nevada after the Culinary Union endorsement made it appear they would help Barack Obama.” Adds the Prospect‘s Ezra Klein: “This is the sort of decision that has the potential to tear the party apart.”
Tag: Josh Marshall
Clinton’s Racial Provokatsiia.
“We seem to be at the point where there are now two credible possibilities. One is that the Clinton campaign is intentionally pursuing a strategy of using surrogates to hit Obama with racially-charged language or with charges that while not directly tied to race nonetheless play to stereotypes about black men. The other possibility is that the Clinton campaign is extraordinarily unlucky and continually finds its surrogates stumbling on to racially-charged or denigrating language when discussing Obama.” TPM‘s Josh Marshall ponders the last week in politics, while going on to defend Clinton’s “fairy tale” remark as untinged by race. (I would agree — I found it dismaying for other reasons, which I’ve explained twice, and which The Nation‘s David Corn also finds reprehensible — the Rovian swift-boating of Senator Obama’s stance on the Iraq war.)
Another commenter at TPM aptly characterized what the Clintons have been doing here (the “rope-a-dope” strategy I outlined in the comments the other day.): “I think that the Clintons’ anti-Obama strategy is more subtle than commentators are realizing. It is in the nature of a ‘provokatsiia’, as the Russians say…Such comments are a provocation, waving a red cloak in front of the Obama people. When they respond angrily with charges of racism, suddenly they look like Jesse Jackson redux…just the kind of angry, militant black folks who scare white people…The whole point was to get the Obama people to respond angrily, which they did. Clintons win.” And we all get dirty.
Update: “Is it possible that accusing Obama and his campaign of playing the race card might create doubt in the minds of the moderate, independent white voters who now seem so enamored of the young, black senator? Might that be the idea?” The Post‘s Eugene Robinson sees a similar strategy at work.
Update 2: As does Margaret Carlson: “While it isn’t clear from whose sleeve the card was pulled, it is likely it wasn’t from the person with the most to lose. If Hillary Clinton’s campaign had taken only one shot at Obama, it might have been blown off as a mistake. But four shots constitutes a pattern.”
Update 3: As does the New York Times: “By the time the campaigns got to New Hampshire, the Clinton team was panicking…It was clearly her side that first stoked the race and gender issue.“