Remember the smears from 2008 against President Obama?
The Obama campaign has repeatedly claimed it has been the target of dirty tricks by the Clinton team. A senior member of her staff, Bill Shaheen, had to resign last year after raising Obama's admitted use of marijuana and cocaine as a youth.
A junior staffer resigned in December after forwarding an email suggesting Obama is a Muslim. In the South Carolina primary last month, Bill Clinton made race an issue.
However, the tactics are widely believed to have contributed to a backlash against the Clintons among Democrat voters.
Plouffe described circulation of the picture as part of "a disturbing pattern". "It's exactly the kind of divisive politics that turns away Americans of all parties," he said.
And when that type of tactics backfired before, Bill Clinton personally called Rep. Jim Clyburn in the middle of the night and went into a tirade. A recent article described the episode this way:
Bill Clinton did indeed call a leading black lawmak[er] in the middle of the night, using profanity, simply to intimidate the man and express anger over his wife losing South Carolina.
In 2016, the smears on Bernie Sanders are perhaps a little less obvious, but still distasteful nonetheless.
But there is a growing sense among young CBC staffers that the attacks lobbed at Sanders are unseemly. In recent days, black lawmakers have called Sanders an “absentee” on issues important to black voters. On Wednesday — the day the endorsement was first reported — three aides said they had been asked to draft talking points for lawmakers on how to hit Sanders indirectly.
“It’s not stately,” a senior aide to a member of the CBC granted anonymity so that the aide could speak freely. “I’ll kiss the ring of whoever my party nominates, but right now I’m with Bernie and I’ve seen the behind the scenes efforts to discredit and suppress him. It’s not us and it’s not the way we should be approaching this.”
Said another aide, “I am pretty unconvinced that having [Clinton’s] CBC surrogates blast Bernie is the right strategy.”
Some backlash has already happened. Which led to a walkback of some of the smear. A recently surfaced video does make it hard to maintain that smear.
Also in 2016, representatives of the Clinton campaign have tried to intimidate high profile black supporters of Bernie Sanders like Nina Turner:
When you decided to support Sen. Sanders, did you catch any heat?
"Oh, my god yes. I've had white Hillary supporters saying to me that I betrayed the Clintons and saying I'm not going to have a future in politics.
I mean, they marked me for life, and I'm sitting back thinking: The Clintons never helped me to do a thing in my life, and all of a sudden they control my destiny? That was very condescending to me.
Recent discussions from Ta-Nehisi Coates and Michelle Alexander have reportedly swayed many young black voters toward Sanders (link, link) Polls, thus far, still show Secretary Clinton with a substantive lead among African American voters. If more reports of dirty tactics surface, it might cause a backlash that could hurt her support among African Americans.
