red states rule
11-16-2007, 06:24 AM
It is about time somebody tries to make Hillary answer questions and actually tell us what she wants, thinks, and believes in
To some, that is a dirty campaign tactic and is a vicious attack
Obama Joins Right-Wing Attack Machine
By Rich Lowry
In the early 1990s, few right-wing bugaboos loomed as large as Hillary Clinton's secret health-care task force. Conservatives who still routinely invoke the task force can seem obsessed with rehashing the greatest anti-Clinton hits of yore. But look who's talking about the task force now.
"They took all their people and all their experts into a room, and then they closed the door, and they tried to design the plan in isolation from the American people," said no, not Rush Limbaugh or Newt Gingrich or Rudy Giuliani, but the nation's foremost liberal tribune of hopefulness, Barack Obama.
The latest turn in the Democratic primary race is the best thing to happen to Republicans since the 2006 elections. Two high-profile Democrats, Obama and John Edwards, are validating a core part of the anti-Hillary case that Republicans have made for years -- that she's a slippery cynic who cares only about power.
In the initial phase of the Democratic primary fight, her opponents attacked Hillary for voting for the Iraq War and refusing to apologize for it. This was an ideological attack that Hillary cleverly defused, while remaining more hawkish -- and therefore better positioned for a general election -- than her opponents. To the extent such attacks from the left make her seem more centrist, they help her. The latest round of criticisms is more insidious. They aren't so much ideological -- though they still come from the left -- as character-ological. Hillary is a calculating and poll-driven double-talker. This line of attack amounts to millions of dollars' worth of free advertising for the eventual Republican nominee and for conservative groups that will attack Hillary on these grounds next fall.
The character attacks box Hillary in. Her primary strategy so far has been to placate the left of her party while not saying anything that will hurt her in the general election. The strategy involves careful positioning that necessarily opens her to the charges that she's calculating and evasive. Hillary has a bitter choice: either to hew to her (otherwise sensible) primary strategy and get tagged as a shrewish triangulator, or to swing left and risk alienating general-election voters.
for the complete article
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/11/obama_joins_rightwing_attack_m.html
To some, that is a dirty campaign tactic and is a vicious attack
Obama Joins Right-Wing Attack Machine
By Rich Lowry
In the early 1990s, few right-wing bugaboos loomed as large as Hillary Clinton's secret health-care task force. Conservatives who still routinely invoke the task force can seem obsessed with rehashing the greatest anti-Clinton hits of yore. But look who's talking about the task force now.
"They took all their people and all their experts into a room, and then they closed the door, and they tried to design the plan in isolation from the American people," said no, not Rush Limbaugh or Newt Gingrich or Rudy Giuliani, but the nation's foremost liberal tribune of hopefulness, Barack Obama.
The latest turn in the Democratic primary race is the best thing to happen to Republicans since the 2006 elections. Two high-profile Democrats, Obama and John Edwards, are validating a core part of the anti-Hillary case that Republicans have made for years -- that she's a slippery cynic who cares only about power.
In the initial phase of the Democratic primary fight, her opponents attacked Hillary for voting for the Iraq War and refusing to apologize for it. This was an ideological attack that Hillary cleverly defused, while remaining more hawkish -- and therefore better positioned for a general election -- than her opponents. To the extent such attacks from the left make her seem more centrist, they help her. The latest round of criticisms is more insidious. They aren't so much ideological -- though they still come from the left -- as character-ological. Hillary is a calculating and poll-driven double-talker. This line of attack amounts to millions of dollars' worth of free advertising for the eventual Republican nominee and for conservative groups that will attack Hillary on these grounds next fall.
The character attacks box Hillary in. Her primary strategy so far has been to placate the left of her party while not saying anything that will hurt her in the general election. The strategy involves careful positioning that necessarily opens her to the charges that she's calculating and evasive. Hillary has a bitter choice: either to hew to her (otherwise sensible) primary strategy and get tagged as a shrewish triangulator, or to swing left and risk alienating general-election voters.
for the complete article
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/11/obama_joins_rightwing_attack_m.html