Has Running for the U.S. Presidency Become a Wrestling Match?

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer

As we know, Hillary Clinton has done just about everything to Barack Obama but physically assault him. And she’s proud of it. She is gleeful that he apparently can’t take a punch.

Clinton ridiculed Obama for lacking “toughness” as she campaigned in Pennsylvania in the days before that state’s April 22 primary contest. “Who do you think has what it takes?” asked one of her television ads.

Claiming the Obama was not up to the task of adequately protecting America, Clinton quoted the famous line from Harry Truman, “If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.”

Maybe that’s why an MSNBC poll taken a day before the vote showed hunters and gun owners favoring Clinton over Obama.

A few weeks earlier, the New York Times had quoted Bill Clinton telling listeners at a rally in West Virginia that “if a politician doesn’t want to get beat up, he shouldn’t run for office.” He called politics “a contact sport.”

But wouldn’t Obama’s so-called lack of toughness also apply to kids being attacked by bullies in schoolyards? Is this what Senator Clinton meant when she asserted, years ago, that “it takes a village to raise a child?”

Pummeling Obama through innuendo and guilt-by-association – Obama has crossed paths with a Chicago professor who forty years ago was a New Left radical; his former pastor has made controversial statements about America – has become the Clintons’ version of “scrutiny” and “vetting.”

I’d be more inclined to call them the kinds of smears once employed by the infamous Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Though it worked in Pennsylvania, where she won the primary, many Democrats can’t stand these scorched-earth tactics anymore. Obama has now been endorsed by Robert Reich, Bill Clinton’s first Secretary of Labour. Reich became the fifth former Clinton cabinet member to endorse the Illinois senator.

“I did not plan to endorse. But my conscience wouldn’t let me stay silent after this latest round of mudslinging,” Reich told the Los Angeles Times on April 18.

“The negative ads coming out of the Clinton camp were just appalling at a time when our nation is facing such huge challenges,” he said. “Those ads are nothing but Republicanism. It’s old politics at its worst -- and old Republican politics, not even old Democratic politics. It’s just so deeply cynical.”

Anyhow, why has running for office become like boxing or wrestling? Do we really want politicians to be street-hardened thugs, or people with inspiring ideas and well-crafted political programs?

And shouldn’t feminists, who have long argued against such a macho approach to politics, be the first to criticize Clinton’s approach? Should a woman – any woman – be supported, no matter what she says and does? Why aren’t people like Gloria Steinem, who earlier this year came out in support of Clinton, speaking up?

The next major contests are in Indiana and North Carolina on May 6. They should post a “mud alert” in both states.