Surprise, surprise:according to an article called "The Front-Runner's Fall" by Josh Green based on some internal Clinton campaign e-mails in the upcoming addition of The Atlantic Hillary Clinton's top campaign strategist, Mark Penn, advised Hillary to paint foreign and disconnected from American values:
The magazine reports Penn suggested getting much rougher with Obama in a memo on March 30, after her crucial wins in Texas and Ohio: "Does anyone believe that it is possible to win the nomination without, over these next two months, raising all these issues on him? ... Won’t a single tape of [the Reverend Jeremiah] Wright going off on America with Obama sitting there be a game ender?"
Penn, the presidential campaign’s chief strategist, wrote in a memo to Clinton excerpted in the article: "I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values."
It seems clear from this article any lingering doubts could be put to rest that Hillary's campaign management was riff with Rove-Republican thinking .
Penn made suggestions for how Hillary use certain language to portray herself that, by contrast, would emphasize Obama's supposed foreignness:
The Penn memo suggesting that the campaign target Obama’s "lack of American roots" said in part: "All of these articles about his boyhood in Indonesia and his life in Hawaii are geared towards showing his background is diverse, multicultural and putting that in a new light.
"Save it for 2050. ... Every speech should contain the line you were born in the middle of America American to the middle class in the middle of the last century. And talk about the basic bargain as about the deeply American values you grew up with, learned as a child and that drive you today. Values of fairness, compassion, responsibility, giving back
"Let’s explicitly own ‘American’ in our programs, the speeches and the values. He doesn’t. Make this a new American Century, the American Strategic Energy Fund. Let’s use our logo to make some flags we can give out. Let’s add flag symbols to the backgrounds."
I think Penn's advice to explicitly emphasize Obama's suppoed foeiegnness will be what will be talked about over and over in the coming days. But Green's articles supposedly also touches on Hillary's poor management skills:
"The anger and toxic obsessions overwhelmed even the most reserved Beltway wise men," Green writes. "[H]er advisers couldn’t execute strategy; they routinely attacked and undermined each other, and Clinton never forced a resolution. ... [S]he never behaved like a chief executive, and her own staff proved to be her Achilles’ heel.
"What is clear from the internal documents is that Clinton’s loss derived not from any specific decision she made but rather from the preponderance of the many she did not make."
It will be interesting to see how Clinton and Co. will respond to these revaltions. Despite the fact someone from within Clinton's own campaign probably leaked these e-mails to Green, you could bet the Clintons, led by Bill, will blame Obama and his campaign for spreading this information.
Of course, such tactics to emphasize one's own candidate's Americanness to imply your opponent's foreignness wasn't lost on the MccCain camp. Remember their first ad of the general election, that ended with the tag line "the American President Americans have been waiting for:"
You can bet the Republicans will continue to take the advice of their brother in arm, Penn. But you can bet they'll have to find some really creative ways to suggest foreignness because if they get too xenophobic, they risk creating an even bigger shift of Hispanics to the Democratic side.