All these mean bloggers saying that former Senator Bob Kerrey is an albatross across the neck of the Clinton campaign really have got it wrong. Kerrey – who appeared on CNN today after endorsing Senator Clinton for president (click the video link above to see his stellar performance) - does something that nobody else can do for Clinton: He humanizes Norman Hsu, the imprisoned Clinton campaign money bundler and Hill-Star, who Kerrey recruited for the board of the New School, a secular madrassa which Kerrey directs in New York...
I agree with Senator Clinton, who told the Quad City Times editorial board: “I think the remarks were very positive. I know Bob. He was being very complimentary of Sen. Obama. He was making a point that Sen. Obama makes himself all the time, that because of his upbringing and his heritage he is, in his view, very well suited to communicate with the rest of the world. And he has just said himself that he wants to have a particular outreach to the Islamic world. So I think Sen. Kerrey was being, you know, very generous in what he said.”
Sincerely, truly, with sugar on top, that says nothing negative about the New School president, whose close relationship to the imprisoned convict and Clinton campaign bundler practically makes him a member of the Hsu family. His full name could be Robert Hsu Kerrey. His defense of Hsu was so, well, as Joe Biden might say, clean and articulate: "This isn't Osama bin Laden or some drug kingpin," Kerrey said. "What he's done is he's volunteered to help people raise money for their campaigns. That doesn't make him either unique or bad."
Kerrey once told the New York Times that he asks each of his board members to kick in at least $25,000. In that sense, Kerrey shows the human side of Hsu, and that some of the money he flimflammed out of investors and Clinton campaign contributors went to a worthy charity and educational institution.
Kerrey even named a scholarship after Norman Hsu, according to the Wall Street Journal, one endowed by the generous Mr. Hsu himself.
“There is a smear campaign going on,” Kerrey told CNN today. That’s the only place he went too far. Does he mean to say that those two Iowa volunteers that Clinton threw under the bus after they spread the same madrassa rumors, or that poor, misunderstood, Billy Sheehan, Clinton’s now-fired co-chair who was only doing Obama the favor of saying what he thought Republicans would say about him, were wrong to do what he, Kerrey, is doing now?
So, all you bad bloggers ought to stop saying that Bob Kerrey is damaging Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Really. Sincerely. I mean it. I rise to Bob Kerrey’s defense, because if not for him voters might just think that all Norman Hsu ever did was take Clinton campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle to Vegas and con investors out of tens of millions of dollars based on his close proximity to the Clintons (as Bill called him at a gala awards dinner, “our friend Norman Hsu”). And that would look very bad for the Clinton campaign if that’s all voters remembered about Norman Hsu as his multiple court cases will haunt the headlines during all of 2008, right up through November. But thanks to Bob Kerrey’s leadership, voters will also remember Clinton’s biggest bundler Hsu as a fine philanthropist with a scholarship named for him at that wonderful secular madrassa in New York.
Al Giordano blogs the Iowa Caucuses and the New Hampshire primary daily at RuralVotes.com’s The Field.