The Clinton campaign's strategy this week seems clear: to try to tarnish Barack Obama's integrity by using surrogates to regurgitate innuendos about his past, and to use Bill to throw out a constant flurry of invented "how dare he?" political charges, to goad the Obama campaign into constant rounds of he-said-she-said political recriminations. If he takes the bait, it would only divert him from mobilizing the full reach of his potential support, which dwarfs anything she could ever muster.
As David Bender suggests, this would work in capturing the nomination only at the cost of irretrievably dividing the party. I know a number of die-hard Democrats who prefer Obama without previously having felt any disregard for Clinton, who are now disgusted with the disingenuous and self-absorbed nature of her behavior in this campaign. Not only is there an effective ceiling on her general-election support due to the antagonism (perhaps undeserved) that most Republicans feel toward her, there is a brand-new disdain that many liberal Democrats are now developing toward the tactics and the discourse that the Clintons are deploying in their drive to discredit their chief rival. Unless she is either defeated decisively in major states on February 5, or substantially modifies her strategy of slamming Obama with distorted claims about him, she could dissolve the chances of a Democratic victory in November.
The Clintons seem to think they can win only by playing old-fashioned, ends-justify-the-means politics. That should make clearer to Obama his only available strategy: ignore them, make more robust the vision of the America he wants to lead, and mobilize with a passion the new, younger voters who have seen in him the promise of a new political future for this country.
posted 01/14/2008 at 23:05:03
As David Bender suggests, this would work in capturing the nomination only at the cost of irretrievably dividing the party. I know a number of die-hard Democrats who prefer Obama without previously having felt any disregard for Clinton, who are now disgusted with the disingenuous and self-absorbed nature of her behavior in this campaign. Not only is there an effective ceiling on her general-election support due to the antagonism (perhaps undeserved) that most Republicans feel toward her, there is a brand-new disdain that many liberal Democrats are now developing toward the tactics and the discourse that the Clintons are deploying in their drive to discredit their chief rival. Unless she is either defeated decisively in major states on February 5, or substantially modifies her strategy of slamming Obama with distorted claims about him, she could dissolve the chances of a Democratic victory in November.
The Clintons seem to think they can win only by playing old-fashioned, ends-justify-the-means politics. That should make clearer to Obama his only available strategy: ignore them, make more robust the vision of the America he wants to lead, and mobilize with a passion the new, younger voters who have seen in him the promise of a new political future for this country.
posted 01/14/2008 at 23:05:03
No comments:
Post a Comment