I love that Hillary lit into Obama today for his nasty, misleading, attack mailers on her. What a total phony he is, crying "same old politics" whenever his record and words are scrutinized, but still putting this crap out.
The facts about these mailers are here:
http://facts.hillaryhub.com/
The Obama campaign is distributing two dishonest mailers in Ohio. The first mailer falsely claims that Hillary said NAFTA was a "boon" to the economy. Hillary never said that. The Obama campaign is basing the quote on a 2006 Newsday article that characterized her views this way without any substantiation. In fact, Newsday recently said that the Obama campaign's use of their article was "misleading." The Politico called the Obama campaign's use of the quote "bogus."
Newsday themselves said this about Hillary and NAFTA:
Because it's raised questions -- with Clinton criticizing Obama for making "false claims" in the mail piece -- we've looked into the chart. In it, we did not have the Clinton campaign using the word "boon" in describing NAFTA. The word was our characterization of how we best understood her position on NAFTA, based on a review of past stories and her public statements.
Tasini called for scrapping NAFTA in 2006. She did not.
We do not have a direct quote indicating her campaign told us she thought it was good for the economy at that time. Also, for that matter, Clinton's campaign did not contact us to question the item after it appeared in print.
Obama's use of the citation in this way does strike us as misleading. The quote marks make it look as if Hillary said "boon," not us. It's an example of the kind of slim reeds campaigns use to try to win an office.
That said, we should have been clearer.
Politico says:
http://www.politico.com/...
An Ohio blogger gets some mail from Obama hitting Hillary on Nafta, once again using that really fairly bogus claim that she called Nafta a "boon."
And about that disgusting Health Care Mailer that the Obama campaign is recycling - Paul Krugman said it best:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/...
Obama does Harry and Louise, again
The Obama campaign sends out an ugly mailer. Sorry, but this is just destructive — like the Obama plan, the Clinton plan offers subsidies to lower-income families. And BO himself has conceded that he might have to penalize people who don’t buy insurance until they need care. So this is just poisoning the well for health care reform. The politics of hope, indeed.
Update: Ezra Klein adds a screenshot of the original Harry and Louise ad — they’ve obviously deliberately copied it. Just to remind everyone, Harry and Louise were the center of the vile smear campaign the insurance lobby waged against health care reform in 1993 — and this time a Democratic candidate is doing the smearing for them.Ezra also points us to an Urban Institute study that shows that yes, mandates are essential. The key passage:
Voluntary measures would tend to enroll disproportionate numbers of individuals with higher cost health problems, creating high premiums and instability in the insurance pools in which they are enrolled.
I know that Obama supporters want to hear no evil, but this is really, really bad.
Hillary is doing exactly what she needs to do, proving that she is a fighter. And Obama continues to prove that he is just another phony politician.