When a campaign is the subject of a campagin based upon smears it is always a difficult decision as to how to respond. This was the case with John Kerry and the Swift Boat Liars in 2004, and with Barack Obama and the smear campaign being run by Hillary Clinton today. One problem is that time devoted to smears can distract from the positive message you wish for the campaign to portray. The Washington Post reviews how this problem has affected the Obama campaign.
The hundreds of people who turned out at the University of Nevada on Friday heard Sen. Barack Obama deliver a lofty stump speech about bridging the nation’s divides and creating a groundswell for change. But they also witnessed him engage in the more mundane task of rebutting attacks from Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton on his positions on Social Security taxes and on the proposed nuclear waste site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
“When Senator Clinton implied that I’m for Yucca when I’ve never been for it, that’s a problem. That erodes people’s confidence in our politics,” Obama said.
It was a sign of a lesson learned the hard way: Let no attack go unanswered.
After his victory in the Iowa caucuses, Obama arrived in New Hampshire more as the head of a movement than as a candidate, greeted by huge crowds that lined up for hours to hear a speech that could have been delivered at a suburban megachurch, all empowerment and inspiration.
I have previously discussed the smears regarding Social Security here. The Washington Post next mentions the smears regarding Obama voting present, which I discussed here.
While the Democratic senator from Illinois was holding his rallies, though, Clinton’s campaign sent out a mailing accusing him of being soft in his support for abortion rights, organized 24 prominent New Hampshire women to send an e-mail echoing that charge and distributed a flier accusing him of seeking a big tax increase on working families. The charges were debatable, but Obama’s only response was a hastily arranged automated phone call decrying the abortion attack. Clinton won the primary with strong support from the mailings’ target audiences — women and working-class voters.
It is understandable that the campaign did not see a need to respond more aggressively to Clinton following the victory in Iowa, and this will hopefully be a lesson Obama does not forget. The loss in New Hampshire following these smears might have been a necessary lesson for Obama to learn should he face the Republicans in a general election campaign.
“We came into New Hampshire on a high,” said David Axelrod, Obama’s senior adviser. “The iconic rallies, combined with the polling, conveyed a sense that we were taking it for granted. She [Clinton] looked like she was working for it, scraping for it.” He added, “This is a long process, and this is how you learn.”
But the new, more aggressive strategy also poses a challenge for Obama: The more time he spends rebutting Clinton attacks, the more difficult it is for him to focus on the broader themes and uplifting rhetoric that have been drawing voters to him. While Obama may have the facts on his side — at least in several instances — engaging with the senator from New York may seem to many voters to be a wearying and obscure show of tit-for-tats that distracts from his overarching offer of a “new kind of politics.”
The article notes that Obama responded to the Reagan issue, which I’ve now commented on in several recent posts reporting that, “The Obama campaign quickly arranged its own call with congressmen, arguing that the remarks were a historical observation, not an endorsement of Reagan’s politics.”
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