Very interesting piece on Salon by Tom Grieve looking at the behind the scenes messaging from Hillary and how it reflects the war room mentality associated with the Clintons. The piece is in response to the video on hillaryhub that accuses the other candidates of abandoning the Politics of Hope by distinguishing their positions from hers.
The whole piece is here
Grieves discusses the communications he is getting from the Clinton campaign and sees an effort to conflate legitimate criticism with GOP folderal. Her campaign cannot distinguish between a legitimate drawing of distinctions between her positions and those of her rivals and "the "undermining the troops" and "advocating America's defeat" crap that's the stock in trade of the GOP these days."
His take is
The last thing the Democratic Party needs now is somebody else -- let alone one of its own -- suggesting that open debate is somehow wrong.
More below le fold
the Clinton campaign routinely reaches out to reporters to provide information they might use to attack her Democratic opponents.
Most comes in non-public
e-mails to newspaper reporters and bloggers -- the sorts of e-mails we get from the Clinton campaign but not from the Edwards or Obama camps: On the "off-chance" you didn't read it, here's a copy of a Washington Post editorial calling Obama "irresponsible"; just "wanted to flag this item" in which the Huffington Post criticizes Obama on Iran; here's something Edwards just said about Iraq, and here's something contradictory he said earlier.
Grieves smaller complaint is that this is just a piece of campaign hypocrisy from Clinton.
If you're going to claim that the other guys are doing something wrong in calling your candidate's views into question, you don't get to pretend that you're not doing the same.
The hypocrisy however is just a small piece of cover for the real problem with these efforts and her positioning. It is an effort to stifle real campaign conversations.
Edwards/Obama/Dodd and the others are not going after her on the 1990's false controversies, rather the distinctions being drawn are about substantive policy differences.
If Clinton's Democratic challengers were attacking her with the phony scandals of the 1990s -- the "politics of personal destruction" -- or smearing her with the "undermining the troops" and "advocating America's defeat" crap that's the stock in trade of the GOP these days, then her campaign would be right to be asking about the "politics of hope."
Obama was criticizing Clinton for her positions -- or lack thereof -- on issues such as Social Security, Iran and Iraq. Moreover, he has been doing it with remarkably noninflammatory language. Neither his talk of "triangulation and poll-driven politics" nor his accusation that Clinton will "dodge and spin" to avoid answering questions is what we'd call incendiary. Yes, Edwards' attacks on Clinton have been sharper, but they're still miles away from the Swift-boating, gay-baiting, race-card-playing hardball that any Democratic nominee can safely expect to see in 2008.
As Grieves asks:, "isn't this exactly the sort of debate that candidates and their party ought to be having along the road to the White House?"
I've been somewhat surprised by how visceral my desire that Clinton not be the nominee Setting aside the substantive policy reasons, Grieves has hit upon part of what keeps Clinton far from my second choice, much less my first. Its this sense that with her we are fighting old battles in old ways instead of new ones with an eye on the future.