History Forum / General / British History / April 2008

Hilarious!

The New York Times, after previously ENDORSING Senator Hillary Rodham
Clinton for President of these United States, now seems to be UNENDORSING
her.

Unsureness Of The Democrat Donkey Along The Campaign Trail...

DSH

Lux et Veritas et Libertas
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April 23, 2008

Editorial

The Low Road to Victory

The New York Times

The Pennsylvania campaign, which produced yet another inconclusive result on
Tuesday, was even meaner, more vacuous, more desperate, and more filled with
pandering than the mean, vacuous, desperate, pander-filled contests that
preceded it.

Voters are getting tired of it; it is demeaning the political process; and
it does not work. It is past time for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to
acknowledge that the negativity, for which she is mostly responsible, does
nothing but harm to her, her opponent, her party and the 2008 election.

If nothing else, self interest should push her in that direction. Mrs.
Clinton did not get the big win in Pennsylvania that she needed to challenge
the calculus of the Democratic race. It is true that Senator Barack Obama
outspent her 2-to-1. But Mrs. Clinton and her advisers should mainly blame
themselves, because, as the political operatives say, they went heavily
negative and ended up squandering a good part of what was once a 20-point
lead.

On the eve of this crucial primary, Mrs. Clinton became the first Democratic
candidate to wave the bloody shirt of 9/11. A Clinton television ad — torn
right from Karl Rove’s playbook — evoked the 1929 stock market crash, Pearl
Harbor, the Cuban missile crisis, the cold war and the 9/11 attacks,
complete with video of Osama bin Laden. “If you can’t stand the heat, get
out of the kitchen,” the narrator intoned.

If that was supposed to bolster Mrs. Clinton’s argument that she is the
better prepared to be president in a dangerous world, she sent the opposite
message on Tuesday morning by declaring in an interview on ABC News that if
Iran attacked Israel while she were president: “We would be able to totally
obliterate them.”

By staying on the attack and not engaging Mr. Obama on the substance of
issues like terrorism, the economy and how to organize an orderly exit from
Iraq, Mrs. Clinton does more than just turn off voters who don’t like
negative campaigning. She undercuts the rationale for her candidacy that led
this page and others to support her: that she is more qualified, right now,
to be president than Mr. Obama.

Mr. Obama is not blameless when it comes to the negative and vapid nature of
this campaign. He is increasingly rising to Mrs. Clinton’s bait,
undercutting his own claims that he is offering a higher more inclusive form
of politics. When she criticized his comments about “bitter” voters, Mr.
Obama mocked her as an Annie Oakley wannabe. All that does is remind
Americans who are on the fence about his relative youth and inexperience.

No matter what the high-priced political operatives (from both camps) may
think, it is not a disadvantage that Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton share many
of the same essential values and sensible policy prescriptions. It is their
strength, and they are doing their best to make voters forget it. And if
they think that only Democrats are paying attention to this spectacle, they’re
wrong.

After seven years of George W. Bush’s failed with-us-or-against-us
presidency, all American voters deserve to hear a nuanced debate — right now
and through the general campaign — about how each candidate will combat
terrorism, protect civil liberties, address the housing crisis and end the
war in Iraq.

It is getting to be time for the superdelegates to do what the Democrats had
in mind when they created superdelegates: settle a bloody race that cannot
be won at the ballot box. Mrs. Clinton once had a big lead among the party
elders, but has been steadily losing it, in large part because of her
negative campaign. If she is ever to have a hope of persuading these most
loyal of Democrats to come back to her side, let alone win over the larger
body of voters, she has to call off the dogs.