Obama Attacks and Nobody Notices
| Sun Nov. 11, 2007 9:35 PM PST
Here is my final thought on the Iowa Democratic Party's Jefferson-Jackson Dinner that I liveblogged on Saturday night: Barack Obama finally went on the attack against Hillary Clinton and it didn't seem to matter.
Clinton unveiled "Turn Up the Heat" as a new campaign slogan, but it was Obama who was committed to putting his chief rival through the fire, as he had been promising to do for many weeks. A few days prior to the speech, Obama told the press that Clinton was running a "textbook" campaign. Saturday he said, "The same old Washington textbook campaigns just won't do in this election. Triangulating and poll-driven positions because we're worried about what Mitt or Rudy might say about us, just won't do." Triangulating and polls, of course, are the Clintons' forte.
On Saturday night the senator from Illinois said, "When I'm your nominee, my opponent won't be able to say that I supported this war in Iraq; or that I gave George Bush the benefit of the doubt on Iran; or that I support that Bush-Cheney diplomacy of not talking to leaders we don't like." In the span of one long sentence, Obama attacked the frontrunner on Iraq and on Iran, and compared her foreign policy philosophy to Bush's and Cheney's.
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Then there were the attacks on Clinton that bordered on the personal. For example, the statement, "I don't want to spend the next year or the next four years re-fighting the same fights that we had in the 1990s." Or the line, "I am not in this race to fulfill some long-held ambitions or because I believe it's somehow owed to me." (Full text here.)
But you'll notice one thing: Hillary Clinton is never mentioned by name. Obama continues to observe the piece of campaign trail etiquette that keeps candidates from naming the subjects of their critiques. John Edwards has chosen to ignore that little brocard, and incidentally, is seen by many as the underdog currently drawing the sharpest contrasts between himself and Clinton.
Perhaps Obama needs to do the same if he hopes to be effective. After the speech, I asked an undecided voter who was leaning towards Obama what she thought of his attacks on Clinton. After a pause, she said, "I didn't notice that at all. And I'm usually pretty sensitive to that sort of thing." And when I asked the same question to a Clinton supporter standing nearby, she just stared at me blankly.
Later, I caught an Obama supporter outside an afterparty. "I don't know if I would call them attacks," he said of the lines above. "I think at this point in the game all three frontrunners are just trying to separate themselves." I'm saying here that Obama will have to "turn up the heat" if he's going to do that with any real results.
Comments
Submitted by carlos maloney (not verified) on Mon Nov. 12, 2007 1:04 PM PST.
go go obama go, you are on the move
and you will be the man to beat.
keep the heat on!
Obama speaks to me because he is, was, and forever will have been unequivocally against the war in Iraq. I waffled because I thought Colin Powell always told the truth. I was wrong to have been misled by him. I also very much appreciate the fact that Obama seems to be an independent thinker and, as a lawyer and constitutional law scholar, he truly understands the US Constitution (a quintessential liberal document if there ever was one).
John Edwards is honest about his involvement about the vote to let Bush go to war in Iraq and at least admits it was a mistake and is working toward getting us out of Iraq. He also has actually worked at helping poor families that have been mistreated by big corporations and has made a valiant effort to show what a real health care program should be.
With Clinton and Obama tearing away at the Democratic Party Edwards is the salve that will heal the wounds and bring the country together to move forward.
It's a shame the voters are allowing the media to lead them around by the nose rather than thinking for themselves. Neither Clinton no Obama is really qualified, for different reasons. The most qualified candidate in either party is Bill Richardson, but he can't get the media attention the less qualified candidates are getting, and the voters are allowing it to happen.
What you don't mention, Mr. Stein, is that what made his attacks so brilliant is that they weren't attacks or even what the supporter you spoke to called attempts to "separate" himself from Clinton. They were, in fact, comprehensive critiques of the entire 1990s attitude that created a citizenry that, whether or not it wants to admit it, participated in the fiasco that the last 7 years have been. Obama's appeal is that he stands for something beyond the politics of electioneering and actually stands for an idea of responsibility that has been expurgated from political discourse that relies on excuse-making, hand-tying, and all around denial of personal agency. To localize such a general, indeed substantive, point to the Hillary campaign seems like a tactical blunder to me.
