You can either fling mud, or just allude to the mud and hope that it just keeps stuck in everyone’s mind:
COLUMBIA, S.C. — Robert L. Johnson, the founder of Black Entertainment Television, who is campaigning today in South Carolina with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, just made a suggestion that raised the specter of Barack Obama’s past drug use. He also compared Mr. Obama to Sidney Poitier, the black actor, in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.”
At a rally here for Mrs. Clinton at Columbia College, Mr. Johnson was defending recent comments that Mrs. Clinton made regarding Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. She did not mean to take any credit away from him, Mr. Johnson said, when she said that it took President Johnson to sign the civil rights legislation he fought for.
Dr. King had led a “moral crusade,” Mr. Johnson said, but such crusades have to be “written into law.”
“That is the way the legislative process works in this nation and that takes political leadership,” he said. “That’s all Hillary was saying.”
He then added: “And to me, as an African-American, I am frankly insulted that the Obama campaign would imply that we are so stupid that we would think Hillary and Bill Clinton, who have been deeply and emotionally involved in black issues since Barack Obama was doing something in the neighborhood – and I won’t say what he was doing, but he said it in the book – when they have been involved.”
Clever, huh? Keeps the drug use in the public mind, while Hillary can straight-faced say she’s not getting into that anymore…
UPDATE: Getting dirty in Nevada, too? Over at Battle Born Politics, we detail efforts of Clintonistas to suppress Obama’s likely voter turnout.
Tags: 2008 Campaign, negative campaigning
January 13th, 2008
Man, it is so amusing to watch Democrats pretend like they are above negative campaigning and attacks (with the exception of attacking Bush or Republicans, of course) and yet, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have both launched sites chronicling attacks made against them by the other. There’s Obama’s Hillary Attacks site and there’s Hillary’s Attack Timeline site.
It’s nice to see that Democrats are above attacks and negative campaigning.
Tags: Democrat hypocrisy, Extremism, negative campaigning
December 20th, 2007
I love how Barack Obama is claiming the moral high ground on the issue of negative ads and attacks by launching what can essentially be called an attack website against Hillary Clinton.
Seriously. Every campaign season we get candidates claiming they don’t like negative campaigning, making self-righteous pledge not to go negative, then suddenly everyone is shocked–shocked that they are getting criticized for something, and thus launches everyone into negative attack mode… as if we expected differently.
Let’s stop kidding ourselves. Everyone says they’re against negative ads, but saying you’re against negative ads is really just talk because eventually something happens that “forces” that candidate to go negative… but in self defense. In the end, everyone does it because, like it or not, negative ads are quite effective… even thought candidates claim they aren’t when they oppose negative ads.
The worst is how Democrats pretend like it’s the Republican Party that is the party of negative ads and attacks. This is the same Party that can’t speak a sentence without blaming something on President Bush, and they act as if no one in the Democratic Party has ever had anything to do with a negative ad before.
Tags: negative campaigning, President Bush
December 4th, 2007
