The bill of particulars, from an article by Paul Waldman:
Pick your tired metaphor — take-no-prisoners, brass knuckles, no-holds-barred, playing for keeps — however you describe it, the Clinton campaign is not only not going easy on Obama, they’re doing so in awfully familiar ways. So many of the ingredients of a typical GOP campaign are there, in addition to fear. We have the efforts to make it harder for the opponent’s voters to get to the polls (the Nevada lawsuit seeking to shut down at-large caucus sites in Las Vegas, to which the Clinton campaign gave its tacit support). We have, depending on how you interpret the events of the last couple of weeks, the exploitation of racial divisions and suspicions (including multiple Clinton surrogates criticizing Obama for his admitted teenage drug use). And most of all, we have an utterly shameless dishonesty.
On some of these points, Clinton hasn’t yet reached GOP levels of underhandedness. But on the simple question of honestly characterizing their opponent, the Clintons are giving any Republican campaign in memory a run for its money.
The latest example is the Clinton camp’s extremely effective effort to twist some remarks Obama made about Ronald Reagan and the years since his presidency beyond all recognition, which came up in their debate Monday night. In an interview with the editorial board of the Reno Gazette-Journal, Obama had said that Reagan had successfully "changed the trajectory of America, in a way that Richard Nixon did not, and in a way that Bill Clinton did not," a claim few people of any ideological stripe would dispute. He also said, "I think it’s fair to say the Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time over the last 10 or 15 years, in the sense that they were challenging conventional wisdom."
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And that was only the latest. During the whole messy back-and-forth over race, a disagreement neither candidate seemed truly comfortable having, Bill Clinton went on The Tom Joyner Morning Show (one of the most widely-syndicated radio programs in the country), and claimed that Obama’s advisors had said all sorts of terrible things about his wife. "No one," he said, "should accuse someone like Hillary of being a racist who’s responsible for the assassination of Benazir Bhutto." That would indeed be an awful charge to make, had anyone actually made it. But no one had….
Then there’s the argument Bill Clinton made on multiple occasions, that Obama couldn’t say he had always opposed the Iraq war: "How could you say that when you said in 2004 you didn’t know how you would have voted on the resolution?" As the article in question read, Obama "declined to criticize Senators Kerry and Edwards for voting to authorize the war, although he said he would not have done the same based on the information he had at the time. ‘But, I’m not privy to Senate intelligence reports,’ Mr. Obama said. ‘What would I have done? I don’t know. What I know is that from my vantage point the case was not made.’"
One might argue that although Clinton distorted Obama’s comment in attempting to argue falsely that Obama at some point went from being a war opponent to being something else, it’s hardly so egregious a sin of campaign legerdemain as to be unforgivable. Perhaps. So let’s try this one: Obama has said we should consider the possibility of lifting the cap on Social Security taxes, which in 2008 stands at $102,000 — any income above that amount is not subject to the tax. There are reasonable arguments on both sides of this question, but the whole point of such a move would be to make the tax less regressive than it is now, by making the wealthy pay the same share of their income in the tax as everyone else.
When Hillary Clinton decided to go after Obama for considering lifting the cap, she did it in the kind of deceptive, demagogic way you’d expect from a Republican: by sending out a mailer in Nevada accusing Obama of having "a plan with a trillion dollar tax increase on America’s hard-working families." Obama had no "plan" — he merely said that lifting the cap was something worth considering — and the people affected would be upper-middle class and wealthy Americans, not the blue-collar folk implied by the term "America’s hard-working families."
I know that’s a long excerpt, but it accurately describes the Clinton campaign tactics lately. Very underhanded, very smear-y.
Ezra Klein says so what. This is good training for Obama who might have to actually face underhanded tactics from a Republican opponent.
Well, maybe so. But I’d rather see a Democrat fight against an underhanded Republican opponent, than fight underhandedly like a Republican opponent.
If Hillary Clinton can’t win without playing political games of deception, and telling lies — things she knows are lies — about her opponents, then maybe she’s not fit to the nomination based on her merits.
Sadly, it seems to be working in her favor so far. But not with this voter. I recognize that Obama doesn’t want to engage in tit-for-tat smearing, and I praise him for that. But he’s got to fight back soon. If Hillary wants to chastize Obama for some business associates he had 20 years ago, I suppose Obama could play that game as well. And we’re talking about the Clintons here — there’s plenty of meat there.
UPDATE: Clinton’s former Secretary of Labor and NPR contributor, Robert Reich, also ain’t too happy with his former boss (NOTE: they were also good friends since their college days). From his blog:
I write this more out of sadness than anger. Bill Clinton’s ill-tempered and ill-founded attacks on Barack Obama are doing no credit to the former President, his legacy, or his wife’s campaign. Nor are they helping the Democratic party. While it may be that all is fair in love, war, and politics, it’s not fair – indeed, it’s demeaning – for a former President to say things that are patently untrue (such as Obama’s anti-war position is a “fairy tale”) or to insinuate that Obama is injecting race into the race when the former President is himself doing it. Meanwhile, the attack ads being run in South Carolina by the Clinton camp which quote Obama as saying Republicans had all the ideas under Reagan, is disingenuous. For years, Bill Clinton and many other leading Democrats have made precisely the same point – that starting in the Reagan administration, Republicans put forth a range of new ideas while the Democrats sat on their hands. Many of these ideas were wrong-headed and dangerous, such as supply-side economics. But for too long Democrats failed counter with new ideas of their own; they wrongly assumed that the old Democratic positions and visions would be enough. Clinton’s 1992 campaign – indeed, the entire “New Democratic” message of the 1990s – was premised on the importance of taking back the initiative from the Republicans and offering Americans a new set of ideas and principles. Now, sadly, we’re witnessing a smear campaign against Obama that employs some of the worst aspects of the old politics.
See also: "Some In Party Bristle At Clintons’ Attacks" – Washington Post