Enough with the lame excuses about Hillary being a fighter, Obama is the champ

Ruthlessness and Grit Seen in Clinton’s Style

By MARK LEIBOVICH and KATE ZERNIKE
Published: May 5, 2008

JEFFERSONVILLE, Ind. — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is waving her fists across Indiana, signing autographs on boxing gloves.

“We need a president who’s a fighter again,” Mrs. Clinton said at a rally on Thursday, adding that the next president must understand what it is like to “get knocked down and get back up: that’s the story of America, right?”

In recent days, Mrs. Clinton has chided the experts for “counting me out” and Senator Barack Obama for his inability to “close the deal” and declared that no one was going to make her quit. “She makes Rocky Balboa look like a pansy,” North Carolina’s governor, Michael F. Easley, said in endorsing her, and a union leader in Portage, Ind., praised her “testicular fortitude.”

This kind of language and pugilistic imagery, however, also evokes the baggage that makes Mrs. Clinton such a provocative political figure. For as much as a willingness to “do what it takes” and “die hard” are marketable commodities in politics, they can also yield to less flattering qualities, plenty of which have been ascribed to her over the years. Just as supporters praise her “toughness” and “tenacity,” critics also describe her as “divisive,” “a dirty fighter” or “willing to do anything to win.”

<...>

While Mrs. Clinton is casting herself as a warrior for ordinary Americans who need jobs, health care and cheaper gasoline, she is also establishing a contrast with her opponent, suggesting he is an untested lightweight. She mocks Mr. Obama’s rhetoric as naïve and challenges him to debate her on the back of a flat-bed truck.

more

Before NC, Obama grabs hearty meal

Sen. Barack Obama eats breakfast in Evansville, Ind., Monday, May 5, 2008.
(AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

by John McCormick

INDIANAPOLIS - Before campaigning in North Carolina this afternoon, Sen. Barack Obama spent his morning meeting with union workers in southern Indiana, having a hearty breakfast and trying to tamp down expectations for Tuesday's primaries.

"This is gonna be a tight election here in Indiana. Every poll shows a dead heat," he told union workers in Evansville. "You guys are pretty persuasive. I need you to tell your membership this is something worth fighting for and they need to come out and vote. And vote for me."

The Illinois Democrat had a big appetite, according to the pool report from his morning events.

"I've been losing weight on this campaign," Obama complained. "I hope there are some biscuits and grits."

There were no grits, but he did find some biscuits, including some made by a local supporter in the shape of an "O" (for Obama).

The busy campaigner and fitness fan said he was "starving" as he piled his plate with scrambled eggs, two sausage patties, biscuits and hash browns.

As I reported below, the leaflet concludes by saying: "This message brought to you by your union." So if it fell into the hands of a member of another union, even one supporting Obama, he or she could conclude that his or her own union was behind the pro-Hillary message.

Here's the statement from Change to Win's executive director, Greg Tarpinian...


Pretty harsh stuff. As I reported below, the director of AFSCME council 62, Dave Warrick, argued that the union wasn't obliged to include the disclaimer, because the piece wasn't sent out as a mass mailing and was intended for distribution to AFSCME members only.

But he conceded it was possible that it could end up in the hands of non-AFSCME members.

Hillary Clinton is perhaps the first candidate in primary history to run this process in reverse. The longer the race has gone on, the lower the odds have become that she will finish the season leading either in the popular vote or in elected delegates. (After her victory in Pennsylvania last month, Slate calculated that she would still need eighty per cent “of every remaining vote” to catch up with Barack Obama in pledged delegates, and this week’s contests in Indiana and North Carolina seem unlikely to alter that math substantially.) Clinton’s once commanding lead among superdelegates has shrunk by three-quarters. At various points, her campaign has been on the verge of going broke. Nevertheless, rather than growing weaker, she seems to have become more formidable. How is this possible? And, perhaps more to the point, how can it possibly end?

Last week, the political news was dominated by yet another Obama-related embarrassment. The Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr.,’s performance at the National Press Club, with its praise for Louis Farrakhan—“one of the most important voices in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries”—and its insistence that the United States government is capable of spreading AIDS as a form of genocide, was either foolhardy or treacherous. “Jeremiah Wright has managed to do the impossible this political season,” the Web site RealClearPolitics observed, “unite pundits from the left and the right in agreement about how badly he’s hurting Barack Obama’s quest for the White House.” The incident raised, or, if you prefer, re-raised, questions about Obama’s judgment. It refocussed the campaign on race. And it fed concerns that the Senator lacks the instincts to win a 24/7, spare-no-attack election.

<...>

In the course of the campaign, Clinton has tried out at least a dozen lines of attack against Obama, from ridiculing his message of hope—“The sky will open, the light will come down, celestial choirs will be singing”—to questioning his preparedness. “One of us is ready to be Commander-in-Chief,” she told a crowd in New York. “Let’s get real.” The attacks in themselves have not been especially effective and, as is so often the case, they have had a damaging effect on their instigator; according to a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll, the proportion of Americans who view Clinton negatively has risen to a record high of fifty-four per cent. Still, Clinton has gradually succeeded in altering the terms of the contest. Her message, no less compelling for being self-fulfilling, is that politics is a rough and nasty business. At several points, she has come close to taunting Obama for not being man enough to match her viciousness. “We need a President who can take whatever comes your way,” she told a Philadelphia TV station a couple of weeks ago. “I’m with Harry Truman on this,” she declared at a rally later that day. “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. Just speaking for myself, I am very comfortable in the kitchen.” True to form, Clinton seized on the opportunity offered by Wright, appearing on Fox’s “The O’Reilly Factor” to announce that she found the pastor’s remarks “offensive and outrageous.”

There are, of course, measures of political grit besides the ability to dole out and withstand abuse. Last week, even as the Wright episode was being ceaselessly rehashed, Clinton followed John McCain in proposing a suspension of the federal gasoline tax for the summer. The proposal was aptly described by Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter as “the most irresponsible policy idea of the year.” As Clinton and McCain surely know, a gas-tax holiday would do nothing to address America’s genuine energy problems. It also would not alleviate the country’s economic problems. What it would do is encourage oil consumption—just about the last thing we need. Obama rejected the idea. Clinton immediately began running ads denouncing him for doing so.

link

Clinton To Put Gravity Under Scrutiny

What is Hillary talking about? She's going to break up the OPEC oil cartel? Because we have such a strong hand to play now with the OPEC member states? And isn't the main issue here a matter of rising demand, principally for rapidly expanding economies in Asia, not monopoly pricing?

Hillary is certainly not the first candidate to bash the oil producing states or oil companies around election time. And the polls seem to show it's working for her. But I'm concerned about the widening gap between reality and her campaign trail statements. First with the pledge to obliterate Iran if they attack Israel, then the rebellion against economists and now this.

Where are we going here?