With the polls narrowing in Texas and Ohio, and Obama moving out to a 51% to 39% lead in the latest USA Today/Gallup Poll, the Clinton campaign is getting desperate. Yesterday she misfired badly when attempting to use sarcasm against Obama. Does she really want to be the candidate who opposes hope?
Today hasn’t been any better for Clinton. The big story today was a picture of Obama in native African garb during a visit to Kenya in 2006. It is quite common for politicians to wear local clothes at such events, but apparently some thought this might make Obama look bad. Perhaps the idea was to reinforce the false claims that Obama is Muslim, hoping that most Americans wouldn’t realize that only ten percent of Kenyans are Muslim. Clinton has been known to leak material through Matt Drudge in the past, and today Drudge posted the picture saying it was being distributed by Clinton staffers. Drudge also noted that politicians often wear local costumes and provided examples of Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, and George Bush:
The Clinton campaign’s first response just did not sound like much of a denial. When asked if they put out the picture, the Clinton campaign first gave this answer:
Enough.
If Barack Obama’s campaign wants to suggest that a photo of him wearing traditional Somali clothing is divisive, they should be ashamed. Hillary Clinton has worn the traditional clothing of countries she has visited and had those photos published widely.
This is nothing more than an obvious and transparent attempt to distract from the serious issues confronting our country today and to attempt to create the very divisions they claim to decry.
We will not be distracted.
It wasn’t until several hours of comments that this did not sound like a denial that the Clinton campaign issued an actual denial.
Over the weekend Clinton also claimed that two Obama mailers provided incorrect information on her positions. There were some minor errors in the mailer on NAFTA. Obama characterized Clinton as supporting NAFTA when in reality Clinton has been both for and against it. She should be relieved that Obama didn’t attack her on this flip-flopping. Obama’s mailer also erroneously presents a newspaper’s report of Clinton’s position as if it was an exact quote from Clinton.
Clinton might have taken the high ground after Obama had some minor errors in his mailers, but instead she followed up with a grossly inaccurate mailer which Factcheck.org has debunked in an article entitled Clinton Edits ‘The Truth.’ Their summary states:
Hillary Clinton, stung by an Obama mailer that painted her as a supporter of the North American Free Trade agreement, is responding in kind with a barrage of postcards saying, “Ohio needs to know the truth about Obama’s position on Protecting American Workers and NAFTA.” But the mailer gives less than the whole truth.
It quotes two news reports of Obama praising NAFTA, but it fails to mention that both are from the same event and leaves out his calls for “fair trade” and increased enforcement – and his criticism of trade agreements negotiated “on behalf of multinational companies instead of workers and communities.”