Hillary Clinton's campaign surrogate is continuing her Kindergarten theme claiming that Hillary's recent backfiring attacks on Obama are ok because Obama allegedly started it. Clark's assertion is silly as Obama's been focussed on track record and policy but besides that, as my mother always said, two wrongs don't make a right.
"I was at the debate in Philadelphia," Clark said in a Wednesday conference call with reporters organized by the Clinton campaign. "That’s where it really started, and I think it started with Barack advertising that he was going to go on the offensive and start attacking."
http://thehill.com/...
July, 2007
Youtube Debate and Hillary calling Obama naive and irresponsible for wanting to break with the neocon preconditions based approach to diplomacy.
October, 2007
Philadelphia debate at which Obama and others drew contrasts with Hillary on issues like Iran, open government, and a number of other issues.
Now, reasonable people can disagree about what's an unreasonable attack and what's a legitimate consideration to raise. Reasonable people can also disagree on my characterizations of those debates. However, anyone that doesn't acknowledge that July is before October is not a reasonable person.
Hillary has focussed on Obama's experience. I like the direct responses he's given to this question, like this from the Philly debate:
Obama: The experience I have in politics is primarily legislative. But here's the experience that I think the next president needs. I think the next president has to be able to get people to work together to get things done, even when they disagree.
And I've done that. You know, when I was in Illinois, we brought police officers and civil rights advocates together to reform a death penalty system that had sent 13 innocent men to death row.
And we ended up passing it unanimously, even though originally people had said it couldn't be done.
You know, Dennis earlier was talking about the need to work on nonproliferation issues. I've worked with Dick Lugar, Republican spokesperson for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to focus on the next generation of nonproliferation efforts.
Now, that, I think, is critical experience.
I also think it is critical for the next president to be experienced to stand up to special interests. I'm glad Hillary is talking about it, but I'm the only person on this stage who has worked actively just last year passing, along with Russ Feingold, some of the toughest ethics reform since Watergate, making sure that lobbyists could not provide gifts and meals to congressmen, making sure that the bundling of moneys by lobbyists was disclosed.
And finally, I think we've got to have a president who has the experience of standing up, even when it's not easy, which is what I did in 2002 when i stood up against this war in Iraq 10 days before the authorization.
That is the kind of judgment that I'm displaying during this campaign when I go to Detroit and I say to the automakers that they need to raise fuel efficiency standards; not in front of some environmental group.
That kind of consistency and principled leadership, I think, is what is going to move us in the next direction. That's what I'll provide as president.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/...
Obama answered the charge directly and strongly. He could not be perceived in any way as whining about it or playing the victim, perceptions that will not favor our eventual candidate no matter who it is.
In contrast, Hillary has failed to give direct answers to her critics. I will point to just one instance though others can add more examples in the comments to support the contention. The instance I want to point to relates to the overarching narrative of the campaign. Hillary has tried to frame Obama as too inexperienced for the job. As we have seen, Obama directly answers the charge by citing the fact that he actually has really strong experience in many ways.
However, there's another over-arching argument that is being made here between the clashing campaign themes of experience and judgment. Obama has made the point that experience is not an end-in-itself, not something that is intrinsically good or good for its own sake. The point is driven home by pointing to all the experience of folks like Rumsfeld and Cheney. Here is, indeed, what Wes Clark himself said of that experienced team back in 2001 as a speaker for the Pulaski County Republican Party in Arkansas:
If you look around the world, there's a lot of work to be done. And I'm very glad we've got the great team in office, men like Colin Powell, Don Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Paul O'Neill - people I know very well - our president George W. Bush. We need them there, because we've got some tough challenges ahead in Europe.
http://www.factcheck.org/...
A lot of good all that experience did us. It's true that experience can sometimes be good as a means. It can be a means to accomplishment. Note that Obama's response to the charge of inexperience includes specific references to his legislative achievements, highlighting especially his track record of achieving reforms that make our government more open, more ethical, more accountable, and more democratic. Continuing those reforms in the Obama presidency will lay the groundwork for a sustained progressive mandate. Experience can also be a means to good judgment. Obama has pointed out that he among the leading candidates alone had good judgment in foresight on Iraq. Other candidates have good judgment in hindsight. Hillary does not seem even to have that, refusing to admit that it was a mistake not to read the NIE, to vote for blank check authorization, and to vote against measures seeking to force more diplomacy.
So now the challenge is to Hillary. Can she say how her experience has yielded concrete achievments? Can she say how her experience informs her judgment? Or are we just going to have her surrogates whining about who started it?