As recently as this past Thursday, Hillary Clinton was conciliatory toward Barack Obama, saying how much she respected him and was honored to be running with him in a statement that many interpreted as an acknowledgment that she will probably lose the race for the Democratic nomination.
What a difference a few days make. Over the weekend, there was a dramatic change in the tone and message coming from the Clinton campaign, and, more importantly, from the candidate herself.
It started on Saturday when Clinton called Obama out for what she contended were false campaign ads:
HUBER HEIGHTS, Ohio, Feb. 23 — In perhaps her sharpest attack of the 2008 presidential campaign, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton accused her Democratic rival Saturday of “using tactics that are straight out of Karl Rove’s playbook,” declaring at one point, “Shame on you, Barack Obama.”
Clinton’s comments in Cincinnati represented a marked shift from just two days ago, when she and Obama engaged in a generally good-natured debate in Austin. The Illinois senator responded by noting “the sudden change in tone” and questioning Clinton’s timing, ahead of Sunday newspaper deadlines and with another debate three days away.
“It makes me think there’s something tactical about her getting so exercised this morning,” he said in Columbus.
Gee do ya think ? Obama has used these mailings before, and the same allegations have been made in debates, but Clinton herself has never addressed them, and she certainly hasn’t taken Obama on so directly before. The allegations themselves — that Clinton’s health care proposal would force people to buy health insurance and that she once supported the North American Free Trade Agreement — seem to be largely true if slightly exaggerated. But Clinton wasn’t complaining about the allegations as much as she was complaining about Obama’s allegedly Rovian-like tactics. This isn’t so much a real issue as it was a vehicle for Clinton to try to show that she wasn’t going down without a fight.
On Sunday, she appeared in Rhode Island and made a speech that was striking both for it’s John Edwards-like populism:
PROVIDENCE, R.I., Feb. 24 — Blasting “companies shamelessly turning their backs on Americans” by shipping jobs overseas and railing that “it is wrong that somebody who makes $50 million on Wall Street pays a lower tax rate than somebody who makes $50,000 a year,” Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton increasingly sounds like one of her old Democratic rivals, former senator John Edwards of North Carolina.
Eager to recapture the white, working-class voters who favored her in some of the early primaries but who have since shifted to Sen. Barack Obama, Clinton traded her usual wonky style this weekend for a fiery, populist tone in speeches in Ohio, Texas and Rhode Island.
Instead of giving precise policy details, she repeatedly pointed her finger skyward, declared that Americans “got shafted under President Bush” and cast herself as a fighter, as Edwards often described himself, promising to help most Americans, not just the “wealthy and the connected.”
and her mocking tone toward her opponent:
PROVIDENCE, R.I. — A day after she angrily criticized Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton delighted a crowd of supporters here by playfully mocking her opponent.
“I could stand up here and say, let’s just get everybody together, let’s get unified, the sky will open, the light will come down, celestial choirs will be singing, and everyone will know we should do the right thing, and the world will be perfect,” she told a crowd that laughed at and cheered the jab at Obama’s hopeful rhetoric. “… You are not going to wave a magic wand and have the special interests disappear.”
Clinton again called mailings from Obama’s campaign “dishonest” and “misleading,” a day after doing so before the media as she waved one of the fliers, but she did not repeat her headline-grabbing scolding, “Shame on you, Barack Obama.”
Watch it for yourself:
Clearly, Clinton is ramping up her rhetoric and going negative on Obama in a last-minute attempt to pull of victories in Texas, where the two are tied, and Ohio, where Clinton holds a slight lead. Given the state of the race, it makes sense. Whether it will work is another question entirely.
[...] the recent change in tone, things are still not looking up for the Hillary for President [...]
[...] several days, we’ll start getting a better idea of where March 4th will take us. Clearly, Clinton’s increasingly negative and combative tone is a sign that she’s hoping for a way to turn this race around on a dime. That’s what [...]