Hillary Clinton’s mud sticks to Obama

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Can Hillary Clinton, despite trailing Barack Obama in pledged delegates, still win the Democratic Party nomination? Of course.

I think her attacks on him are bearing fruit. And her primary wins in the big states of Ohio and Texas last week prove it.

Ever since her “Shame on you, Barack Obama!” rant a few weeks ago, during a campaign stop in Cincinnati, in which she sounded like a schoolmarm disciplining a student who had disappointed her, Clinton’s negative campaigning has worked. (Would Mrs. Clinton give Barack a detention and make him stand in a corner, I wondered?)

The issue which so infuriated her involved their respective health-care proposals — although in reality there is not much difference between the two. Still, it made for good political theatre.

It amazes me how so many people can be misled by propaganda. Prior to the Ohio and Texas primaries, Clinton ran a television ad showing a telephone ringing at 3 a.m., while children slept nearby. It was meant to suggest that she, rather than Obama, would make a better president in the event of a national emergency.

Actually, she has no more foreign policy experience than Obama does.

Since when have ‘first ladies’ sat by the ‘hot line’ telephone? Clinton didn’t have security clearance while husband Bill served as president, nor did she attend National Security Council meetings. She wasn’t even given a copy of the president’s daily intelligence briefing.

Insofar as she participated in shaping Bill Clinton’s agenda, it was on domestic matters such as health care, welfare reform, and other ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ issues. She has about as much credibility as a ‘commander-in-chief’ as I do, yet this TV ad apparently was very effective.

Clinton also slammed Obama on the North American Free Trade Agreement, especially in economically hard-hit Ohio, though it was ‘her’ administration — remember, she claims to have “35 years of experience” — that signed it into law. She now insists that she always opposed NAFTA — though we never heard a word about this until recently.

Obama, on the other hand, was portrayed as “two-faced” on the issue — a minor discussion between one of his economic policy advisers and a Canadian consular official in Chicago was blown up by Clinton into an earth-shattering event.

The Clinton campaign made very effective use of a memo obtained by the press, in which Canadian consulate staffer Joseph DeMora noted that Obama’s people said that the threat to withdraw from NAFTA should be viewed as simply “political positioning.”

Obama responded in a dignified manner, trying to set the record straight, by stating that this was blown out of all proportion. It didn’t work.

But wait — it gets worse. It turns out that Clinton’s camp tried to deliver the very same message about NAFTA to Canada, a report her campaign at the time denied.

Clearly, many voters are reluctant to cast their ballots for “nice guys” who aren’t “tough enough” to be as underhanded as Clinton appears to be. They have no respect for people who “fight fair.” A sad commentary on the American electorate.