There is a method, and Obama adviser Samantha Powers unwittingly just showed how it works.
In a recent interview, Powers, Pulitizer prize winning author and foreign policy aide to Obama, admitted that the campaign "f***** up in Ohio. In Ohio, they are obsessed and Hillary is going to town on it, because she knows Ohio's the only place they can win."
Then Powers slipped: "She is a monster, too – that is off the record – she is stooping to anything," Ms Power said, hastily trying to withdraw her remark.
It doesn't matter if what Powers said is true or not. (Just like it doesn't matter if she tried to take back her comment by saying it was off the record--it's now out there.) Powers calling Hillary a monster is exactly the kind of reaction the Clintons want to provoke. Now whenever the Clintons get called on their scurrilous tactics, they'll play they victim and say, but the Obama Campaign called Hillary "a monster." And at the end of the day, the Clintons will get a pass for their trash on the back of a frustrated Obama supporter.
A while ago one of the bloggers at TPM wrote something to the effect that Hillary's strategy is not to make herself look better than Obama, but to show that Obama is just as bad as she is. It's the art of moral equivalency of which the Clintons are the consummate masters.
When the Obama's campaign responds with insults like Samantha Powers did (that is, like any reasonable, but frustrated person would), the Clintons will cry foul and then reference those insults to justify their tactics and to try to silence any criticism.
Of course, it's bullshit--but it still works. And by work, I mean promoting the Clintons over the party, progressive values, and anything or anyone else that happens to stand in their way.
So, the question is, how do we fight it?