McQ:Is that a whiff of desperation from the Clinton campaign? As I pointed out in another thread here, the Clinton specialty is desperation. As Hunter Thompson said: "When the going gets tough, the weird get going."
But the method inside the madness of saying Obama is "too liberal" goes directly to the prime question for Democrats: electability.
It’s part of her counteroffensive back against the notion that she is too polarizing, and thus unelectable. Her squad’s return fire is that Obama is too far upfront with his Leftist approach and that the Republicans will take him right apart on that score, and that is exactly correct.
Obama is nothing new. In fact, he is something quite old: George McGovern. The irony here is, of course, that the Clintons themselves are old McGovernites who learned early on that McGovernites can’t get elected, thus they, the Clintons, developed all sorts of cloaking methods to conceal what was always a Fabian socialist agenda, inclusive of the "internationalist" viewpoint, i.e., "we want to be Europeans."
Hillary, who thinks like a Soviet bureaucrat (See: her circa 1993 health care proposal for the details), knows how to portray Obama as too liberal because that is exactly the thing the Clintons have worked their way around throughout their public career. From their point of view, Obama has stepped right into the trap.
A double irony here is that it was the Clintons, through one of their factotums, Howard Dean, who whipped up the antiwar frenzy in the Democratic base and garnered ego-commitments from that base to the eternal wrongness of Iraq. (See: Lieberman as the test case within the Party.) The Clintons also had Sidney Blumenthal writing for the Guardian in the U.K. leveling grotesque slanders against the Bush administration. As usual, this had nothing to do with the rightness or wrongness of Iraq. Rather, it was a straight on attempt to portray Bush as such a bad president that people would forget how awful the Clintons were. That is the essence of the trope: "At least Bill never lied us into a war." Forget about the fact that Hillary voted for the Iraq incursion and both of them had been trumpeting Iraq’s WMD threat since 1998 and before.
So, their maneuver to discredit Bush on the war — and it was their maneuver — has been so thoroughly successful with the Democratic base that they are now forced to contend with the very inflamed brain stems that they created: "Calm down now, dear pliant brain stems, and reflect on Obama’s electability." |
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Written By:
Martin McPhillips
URL:
http://mcphillips.blogspot.com/
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