As if it wasn’t obvious already, today’s New York Times confirms that the Clinton campaign is going heavily negative against Barack Obama:
After struggling for months to dent Senator Barack Obama’s candidacy, the campaign of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is now unleashing what one Clinton aide called a “kitchen sink” fusillade against Mr. Obama, pursuing five lines of attack since Saturday in hopes of stopping his political momentum.
And, basically, the strategy seems to consist of varying degrees of populism, mocking, and claims that Obama is inexperienced:
After denouncing Mr. Obama over the weekend for an anti-Clinton flier about the Nafta trade treaty, and then sarcastically portraying his message of hope Sunday as naïve, Mrs. Clinton delivered a blistering speech on Monday that compared Mr. Obama’s lack of foreign policy experience to that of the candidate George W. Bush.
“We’ve seen the tragic result of having a president who had neither the experience nor the wisdom to manage our foreign policy and safeguard our national security,” Mrs. Clinton said in a speech on foreign policy at George Washington University. “We can’t let that happen again.”
(…)
In Mrs. Clinton’s speech Monday, she also portrayed herself as “tested and ready” to be commander in chief, while accusing Mr. Obama of believing “that mediation and meetings without preconditions will solve some of the world’s most intractable problems.” Mr. Obama has said he would go further than Mrs. Clinton to meet with leaders of hostile nations, but he has also said he would prepare for those meetings carefully and would not be blind to the leaders’ motives.
On another matter, Mrs. Clinton’s aides criticized Mr. Obama on Monday for not distancing himself from outside groups running advertisements that promote his candidacy, a practice that Mr. Obama has sometimes criticized. An Obama spokesman said in response that Mrs. Clinton had tacitly permitted similar spending without comment.
Coming this late in the campaign, with Clinton falling further and further behind in the polls, going this negative this quickly smacks, quite obviously, of desperation.
March 11th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
[...] And if all you have left to throw at us, after your barrage that even included your kitchen sink, is the term idealist then I will proudly wear that label and know I am in good company with [...]