It's been a long time coming, but in the past few days I've seen a few, small, glimmers of hope that maybe, just maybe, the Clinton campaign has started to back off from the out-and-out negative (and arguably dirty) attack politics they've been pursuing since Wisconsin. Some of these have gotten some play here, others not, that I've seen. Follow me over the jump for a couple of surprising quotes - surprising to me, at least.
I did see a few diaries on Wednesday night about Sen. Clinton's "sorry you were offended" "apology" for Bill's remarks in South Carolina. But to me, the remarkable part of that story was a different comment that she made:
"Once one of us has the nomination there will be a great effort to unify the Democratic party and we will do so, because, remember I have a lot of supporters who have voted for me in very large numbers and I would expect them to support Senator Obama if he were the nominee," she said.
It's a shame that we've sunk so low that such an obvious comment should be remarkable, but given the tone of Sen. Clinton's campaign in the past few weeks, it really is. Apart from anything else, it's rare (at least lately) to hear her openly acknowledge the possibility that Sen. Obama actually might win, and even rarer for her to speak about that possibility in positive rather than negative terms.
Then there's her campaign's response to Olbermann's special comment. As anyone who watched the comment knows, it would have been very easy, and in keeping with the recent tone of the Clinton campaign, to accuse Olbermann and MSNBC of bias, to call for his head on a platter. But as the man himself has diaried on the rec list right now, that wasn't their response at all:
"We, obviously, vigorously disagree with that characterization, although many of us remain fans of Keith and enjoy watching the show on nights other than last night," said communications director Howard Wolfson.
Now, I don't want to overstate the significance of a couple of points of light in the darkness. Some of the campaign's comments about Pennsylvania (where I live, incidentally) are still highly questionable. They've still failed to adequately address the Ferraro mess, in my mind. The claim that Michigan was a "fair vote" is point-blank laughable (although there's hope there too - MSNBC is suggesting that the idea of a new vote is gaining a lot of traction and supported by the Clinton campaign, which, hopefully, will put an end to positive comments about the first vote).
However, I'm a firm believer that positive actions even by people with a history of negative actions should be recognized, praised and encouraged as much as possible. (As an Open Source guy, I take some heat for applying that same attitude to Microsoft, by the way :) ). This is the way we want Sen. Clinton to campaign. If she is willing to run a positive, party-building, Mike Huckabee kind of campaign from here on out, I think the calls for her to drop out of the race pronto, and the "if she's the nominee I'm voting for McCain"s, will diminish in volume significantly. And we can start to look forward again to six weeks of campaigning in PA, IN, NC, and the rest of the remaining states, rather than dreading the idea.
So while we should of course continue to call out her campaign (and Obama's, for that matter, if the situation ever arises) for the negative things they do, let's also call out the positives, and praise them, and encourage her to continue in that tone, and hopefully make those positives a little less rare going forward.