[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYfbf64gBXc]
Barack Obama responded to Hillary Clinton ‘s ad. The video is above and the transcript follows:
I do want to take a moment to respond, because the press is, I’m sure, curious, to an ad that Senator Clinton is apparently running today. It asks a legitimate question. It says, who do you want answering the phone in the White House when it’s 3:00 a.m. and something has happened in the world. It’s a legitimate question. And we’ve seen these ads before. They’re usually the kind that play upon people’s fears and try to scare up votes.
I don’t think these ads will work this time because the question is not about picking up the phone. The question is, what kind of judgment will you exercise when you pick up that phone. In fact, we have had a red phone moment; it was the decision to invade Iraq.
Senator Clinton gave the wrong answer. George Bush gave the wrong answer. John McCain gave the wrong answer. I stood up and I said that a war in Iraq would be unwise. It cost us thousands of lives and billions of dollars. I said that it would distract us from the real threat that we face, and that we should take the fight to al Qaeda in Afghanistan. That’s the judgment I made on the most important foreign policy decision of our generation.
I will never see the threat of terrorism as a way to scare up votes, because it’s a threat that should rally the country around our common enemies. That is the judgment we need at 3:00 a.m., and that’s the judgment that I am running for as president of the United States of America.
Obama wins the exchange on two levels. He debunks the argument of the ad by giving us good reason to hope that if there is such a crisis it is Barack Obama and not Hillary Clinton or John McCain who is making the decisions. Obama also provides another contrast between how he campaigns and how Clinton campaigns.
Hillary Clinton certainly should have known better than to resort to an ad such as this. She should have taken the advice of Bill Clinton while campaigning for John Kerry in 2004:
Now, one of Clinton’s laws of politics is this. If one candidate is trying to scare you and the other one is try get you to think, if one candidate is appealing to your fears and the other one is appealing to your hopes, you better vote for the person who wants you to think and hope.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63h_v6uf0Ao]
Many have compared Clinton’s ad to LBJ’s Daisy Ad from 1964 (video above). While there are comparisons, at least I don’t find Clinton’s ad to be as bad as Johnson’s.