[NYTr] Hillary Clinton and the Politics of Character Assassination

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Counterpunch - Dec 6, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/giordano12062007.html


>From War Room to Panic Room

Hillary Clinton and the Politics of Character Assassination

By AL GIORDANO

Events have conspired to deepen my November 14 argument that a
generational fault line is reshaping the Democratic presidential
nomination contest (“Don’t Trust Anyone Over 50,” CounterPunch,
November 14). To wit:

On November 20, Senator Hillary Clinton of New York, the Democratic
frontrunner, issued an awkward attack on presidential rival Senator
Barack Obama of Illinois, based on his four childhood years as an
American abroad in Indonesia. To an audience in Shenandoah, Iowa, via a
telephone speaker call, Clinton spoke these words: "Now voters will
judge whether living in a foreign country at the age of 10 prepares one
to face the big, complex international challenges the next president
will face.”

The whack wasn’t merely against a ten-year-old boy but also versus any
other American citizen or immigrant that once lived elsewhere. It also
played into the nasty whisper campaign on the right that attempts to
paint Obama as the Manchurian Muslim that Fox News has falsely implied
was trained since childhood to infiltrate and destroy Western
Civilization. But in the context of other recent events, it was part
and parcel of the pattern of hostility by Clinton and her lackeys
toward youth, in general, and young voters in specific.

On December I, the Clinton campaign read a script to various political
reporters about the Obama campaign’s efforts to raise voter turnout
among university students in Iowa, making the (legally errant) claim
that Hawkeye state students that live and study in Iowa but are from
other states should not be able to vote in the January 3 caucuses: “We
are not courting out-of-staters. The Iowa caucus ought to be for
Iowans,” said a Clinton spokeswoman, adding, “We are not systematically
trying to manipulate the Iowa caucuses with out of state people. We
don’t have literature recruiting out of state college students.”

On December 2, Clinton gave an audience in Clear Lake Iowa, according
to the Des Moines Register, an argument reminiscent of those for a
poll-tax as a requirement to vote: “This is a process for Iowans. This
needs to be all about Iowa, and people who live here, people who pay
taxes here.”

The Clinton camp has reason to be worried about the youth vote. The
November 25-28 Des Moines Register poll that showed Obama ahead in Iowa
with 28 percent, to 25 percent for Clinton and 23 percent for John
Edwards – within the margin of error, but with Obama as the only
candidate trending upward – noted Obama’s towering lead among younger
voters: “Obama also dominates among younger caucusgoers, with support
from 48 percent from those younger than 35. Clinton was the choice of
19 percent in that group and Edwards of 17 percent.”

That this year’s Iowa caucuses will be held during winter break,
contrary to conventional wisdom, in fact makes the college student vote
more potent on a statewide level by spreading it to all corners.
Instead of, as in previous years, those votes being concentrated in
Ames and other college towns, the students will be participating in
their hometown caucuses throughout the state. In Iowa, the sum total of
votes does not determine the statewide result. It is rather the sum of
1,700-plus local caucus results that will be added up to determine the
winner. In rural Iowa, where three or four extra votes can dramatically
change caucus results where, say, only 15 voters turn out to caucus,
the decentralization of the university vote will likely have a greater
impact on the statewide results than if it had been ghettoized only in
college towns. In the academic centers, where, because of high caucus
turnout in 2004 there will be a heavy concentration of delegates to be
selected, university professors and staff will likely have a
comparitavely greater influence than in other years: those are also
very strong demographic groups for Obama (who, for example, widely
leads among campaign contributions from employees of academic
institutions, and in polls among the college educated). At issue in
this dust-up is whether students who originate from Illinois and other
states will come back to participate as well.

Efforts to disenfranchise student voters are more commonly the
signature tactics of Republicans. Prior to the November 2004 elections,
the executive director of the Iowa Republican party send a mailer out
to voters, with the images of Senators Clinton and Ted Kennedy of
Massachusetts, proclaiming, “Would you let these two tell you how to
vote?” The flyer added: “They’re not from here. They won’t stay here.
But they’re voting here. As part of the Democrats plan, they have
registered a large number of Grinnell College students from places like
New York and Massachusetts to vote in Iowa… Then why would you let
1,000 east-coast college kids elect your State Representative?”

The ACLU, the Democratic Party, MTV’s Rock the Vote and other
organizations that encourage young voter participation have
historically challenged such voter repression stunts. The sudden
adoption of the same anti-democratic tactics speaks volumes about the
overriding character of Senator Clinton and her campaign in the home
stretch: a paranoid obsession with, and resentment toward, the relative
youth of Obama (who is 46 to Clinton’s 60) and his battalions of young
supporters. The Clinton campaign’s generational meltdown became visible
to all on December 3, when in a press release that sought to paint
Obama as an ambitious pol that had charted his rise to the presidency
from the sandbox of his childhood, it wrote:

    In kindergarten, Senator Obama wrote an essay titled 'I Want to
Become President.’ "Iis Darmawan, 63, Senator Obama's kindergarten
teacher, remembers him as an exceptionally tall and curly haired child
who quickly picked up the local language and had sharp math skills. He
wrote an essay titled, 'I Want To Become President,' the teacher
said." [AP, 1/25/07 ]

The press release included a similar paragraph about such an essay
Obama reportedly penned in third grade, too. Rival candidate John
Edwards, when asked about Clinton’s kindergarten attack, told reporters
in Clear Lake, Iowa, ''It's fine to talk about our records and about
issues. But we probably ought to stop at age 14.'' Later, in Waterloo,
he told voters, "I want to confess to all of you right now. In third
grade I wanted to be two things: I wanted to be a cowboy and I wanted
to be Superman."

What some pundits called “Kinder-Gate” came on the heels of a
buckshot-load of Clinton attacks on Obama’s “courage,” his “character,”
and the policy differences between the two on health care and social
security. “Now the fun part starts,” crowed Clinton on December 3,
defending her escalation of attacks on Obama. But the resulting week
has been anything but fun for Clinton and her campaign.

On the heels of her vanishing lead in Iowa and shrinking lead in
first-in-the-nation primary state New Hampshire and nationwide,
Clinton’s artless attacks generated a near consensus throughout the
ideological spectrum that the frontrunner is blowing it. Former Clinton
cabinet member Robert Reich sharply rebutted what he called the “series
of slurs” by his “old friend” Clinton against Obama. The Wall Street
Journal’s James Taranto wrote that, “a desperate Mrs. Clinton stands on
the brink of losing all dignity.”

Time’s Joe Klein called Clinton’s statements “sweaty and desperate.”
Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic noted, "Some of her top advisers exuded a
sense of entitlement: Clinton deserved to be president; it was her
turn. They did not perceive any threat until it was almost too late."

In full damage-control mode by December 4, Clinton strategist Mark Penn
went on MSNBC to claim that the attack on Obama’s kindergarten essay
was “a joke.” But Boston Globe political reporter Scott Lehigh wrote
that he had, on the day of the press release, asked the Clinton
campaign whether the kindergarten attack was tongue-in-cheek, and did
not get a response: “Asked for some indication that the reference to
elementary-school essays was meant humorously, a Clinton press aide
said he'd have to check and get back to me.”

Meanwhile, as Iowa polls generally show an Obama rise, a Clinton slide,
and an Edwards hover close behind in third, Clinton campaign internet
director Peter Daou circulated two Iowa polls that showed Clinton out
front, sighing, “We'll see how much attention these polls get.” But it
turned out that those polls were taken prior to the newer wave of
surveys, one from November 7 to 25, the other from November 6 to 18.
The bulk of the interviews on each were conducted before the meltdown
began. Clinton aide Daou got caught trying to peddle older polls as new
ones (an indication of just how important perceptions of inevitability
are to the Clinton campaign not only on a propaganda level, but also
for its self-image: after months of using Clinton’s lead in the polls
to smack all criticism by rivals, the campaign is losing its number-one
rationale for existing: it’s much-heralded lead in the polls.)

Clinton’s national lead has also begun to tank. As of December 5, the
Rasmussen daily tracking poll had Clinton with 34 percent – her lowest
support in the history of the tracking poll that began last July – with
Obama at 24 and Edwards at 16 (prior to Thanksgiving, she enjoyed a
24-point lead over Obama; that’s been more than halved in less than two
weeks). Typically, the “Iowa bounce” gives the caucus winner a 12 to 20
point surge in New Hampshire, which next year votes on January 8.

It may be that Clinton and her strategists have already written off
Iowa and seek to diminish its importance so as to later be able to
bounce back from a defeat there while attempting to influence which of
her rivals emerges stronger on January 3. Her attacks on Obama are
reminiscent of the famous “murder-suicide” crossfire, four years ago,
between Howard Dean and Dick Gephardt, who had been first and second in
the polls until the week before the caucuses. Both went negative on the
other and Iowa voters chose the more positive candidacies of John Kerry
and Edwards over the frontrunners on caucus night. National Review’s
Rick Lowry paraphrases Major Garrett on Fox News’ take on the
Democratic contest: “Hillary is probably going after Obama so hard in
Iowa because she can afford to have Edwards win there in a way she
can't with Obama.”

I tend to agree with those conservative commentators: Clinton’s intent
is to drag Obama into the mud pit with her. If she’s likely to crash in
Iowa, why not set up the under-funded Edwards to emerge as her chief
rival when she can bury Edwards later on from California to New York
Island under an avalanche of TV ads? But Obama (who has slightly
out-raised Clinton in the money race, and has the warchest to go
toe-to-toe with her for months on end), also aware of caucus history,
hasn’t bitten on that hook.

It may be that it was Clinton that fell into an Obama-laid trap when
she launched the negative attacks. As Andrew Romano of Newsweek wrote,
“while Obama's ‘politics of hope’ once prevented him from criticizing
Clinton without appearing hypocritical, it now allows him to dismiss
every clever (but ultimately insubstantial) Clinton charge as proof
that she's playing ‘politics as usual’ – thereby boosting Obama's
outsider appeal. What was bad for offense is now good for defense.
Listening to Obama characterize Clinton as a typical pol is one thing;
he did that for months to little effect. But watching him bait her into
behaving like one is another. It's much more convincing.”

The Clinton attacks on a ten-year-old Obama, a third-grade Obama and
Obama the kindergartner also carry the sleazy underside of thinly
veiled back-up to right-wing smears suggesting that those years he
spent abroad in an Islamic land mean he’s not really a Christian (Obama
is a member of the United Church of Christ). The Washington Post’s
November 28 page-one story on “Obama’s Muslim Ties,” which has now been
openly criticized by two of the newspaper’s reporters, one of the
daily’s cartoonists and even the editor of the same story (the Post
ombudsman is expected to weigh in against the piece on Sunday) did not
come out of thin air: the spin, as with all major works by
over-extended daily newspaper political reporters, was pushed and
spoon-fed by a rival campaign. There’s no way to prove or disprove
which made the attack. But in that context came a December 5 revelation
that an Iowa county chair for Clinton by the name of Judy Rose had
forwarded an email that whacked Obama with the slur: “The Muslims have
said they plan on destroying the U.S. from the inside out, what better
way to start than at the highest level - through the President of the
United States, one of their own!!!!” The Clinton campaign called for
that county chair’s resignation only after her emails became grist for
political blogs on Wednesday.

When asked by reporters earlier this week to respond to the Clinton
campaign’s kindergarten attack, Obama’s response suggests that he is
aware that it comes with a backhanded attempt to reinforce the
Manchurian Muslim argument: “It must be silly season,” Obama said. “I
understand she's been quoting my kindergarten teacher in Indonesia.” He
then resumed the theme of that day’s events: protecting consumers from
predatory credit card company practices. But it’s significant that
Obama, without prodding, brought up Indonesia, the unspoken part of the
Clinton attacks on his childhood years. Rather than running from the
four years of his autobiography that place him, as a kid, in the
country with the world’s largest Islamic population, Obama has
frequently pushed that experience – as well as the fact that his late
immigrant father and his living grandmother in Kenya are Muslim – as a
factor that would help him as president begin to undo the damage of the
Bush-Clinton-Bush years between the US and the Islamic world.

Still, the glue that ties all these missteps by Clinton and company
together is not the anti-Islamic undertone. The sticking point, and
source of tremendous personal resentment against Obama, remains
generational. The battering of a 10-year-old Obama and the subsequent
slaps on his kindergarten and third-grade essays were so over-the-top
as to reveal a very personal hatred on the part of Clinton toward the
youthfulness that he represents. If a 46-year-old Obama annoys, the
image of a K-6 Obama must really bother the aging boomer senator.

Clinton and her team exude a divine right to the Oval Office, a sense
of entitlement, and that damn youngster Obama didn’t “wait his turn.”
These latest foibles follow last summer’s string of Clintonian hits
against Obama’s supposed “naïve” and “inexperienced” qualities, and her
top staffers’ condescending complaint in November about Obama’s young
supporters, that, “They look like Facebook.”

But the money point is how the Clinton hostility toward younger
generations has now reached the extreme of corrupting her policy
positions, with Clinton and her staff openly seeking to suppress and
demonize young voter turnout in Iowa. (That’s also strategically
stupid: the best way to get young people to do something is to tell
them they shouldn’t or can’t do it. And Obama responded by touring five
major Iowa universities on December 4 and 5, reminding the
standing-room-only crowds that Clinton seeks to discourage them from
participating in the caucuses.)

Thus, the Hillary Clinton that cut her political teeth as an advocate
for children’s rights, as legal counsel to Marian Wright Edelman’s
Children’s Defense Fund, as the self-proclaimed advocate, as First Lady
in the 1990s, for kids, nears the possible twilight of her political
career as a sneering adversary of youth and its voting rights.

The Iowa caucuses are four weeks away, but the curtain for major shifts
in momentum will close in about two weeks when the mad shopping weekend
before Christmas vacation begins. Then the campaign enters a twilight
zone in which accurate polling cannot be done (with some demographic
groups, particularly younger voters, traveling away from home more than
others), when negative attacks and ads will not be possible (without
the attacker painting herself as today’s Ebenezer Scrooge and suffering
a yuletide backlash), when New Years and bowl games immediately precede
the January 3 caucuses, and so the dynamics, beginning around December
19, will not be subject to major shifts.

At this point, if current trends continue, Senator Hillary Clinton
(nee, Inevitable) may well be headed for a painful crash in the Iowa
caucuses. The famed Clinton “War Room” has become the Panic Room. And
if a black man wins the presidential caucuses in lily-white Iowa, the
resulting shock won’t only inspire younger voters to flood the
subsequent primaries and caucuses in the coming months.
African-Americans and other alienated demographic groups will likely
join the siege.


[Al Giordano, the founder of Narco News, has lived in and reported from
Latin America for the past decade. His opinions expressed in this
column do not reflect those of Narco News nor of The Fund for Authentic
Journalism, which supports his work. Al encourages commentary,
critique, additional analysis and news tips for his continued coverage
of the US presidential campaign to be sent to his email address:
narconews at gmail.com ]