Samantha Power, a senior foreign policy adviser to Barack Obama, recently made the headlines when the Scotsman newspaper quoted her saying that Senator Clinton is “a monster . . . stooping to anything”. Although Ms Power tried to withdraw the remark in mid-sentence, Gerri Peev, her interviewer refused to allow this. Soon after the article was published, Ms Power, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, resigned. She spoke of her “deep regret” for” inexcusable remarks that are at marked variance for my oft-stated admiration for Senator Clinton and from the spirit, tenor and purpose of the Obama campaign.” Speaking to the political journalist Tucker Carlson, Peev defended her inclusion of the remark by saying that “If this is the first time that candid remarks have been published about what one campaign team thinks of the other candidate, then I would argue that [US] journalists are not doing a very good job of getting to the truth.”
Leaving aside the ethical question of when journalists should allow someone to retract remarks that are technically on-the-record, Ms Power’s fate is curiously harsh when considered in the context of the Clinton campaign’s recent attacks. For several months, despite Obama’s resolve to eschew ad hominem criticism, most of the American media has made little effort to get at the truth of the atmosphere within each camp. In fact, very few have been willing to acknowledge that the Clinton campaign has tried to smear Obama almost from the start. A few months back, there were heavy-handed hints about his self-confessed youthful drug use. When those failed to catch on, the “opposition research” turned towards his “electability” and “experience”. When a string of victories made nonsense of that, the Clinton camp seems to have decided that it would rather hazard its future on the “politics of personal destruction” rather than allow Obama the dignified victory he seems to deserve.
Faced with a practically insurmountable lead in pledged delegates, the Clintons have thrown political tact and good taste to the winds. Not content to dismiss Obama as a merely black candidate, they have scoffed at his record of opposition to the war in Iraq (“a fairytale”) – the better to distract voters from Clinton’s notoriously flawed judgements on the matter. They have pandered to the post 9/11 obsession with national security by running an ad that asks who would do a better job of answering a 3 am crisis phone call to the White House – the former First Lady or a greenhorn like Obama? (Spotting the obvious flaw in this argument, John McCain offered his longstanding legislative experience as far more reassuring than that of either Democrat.) The Clintons have also begun, with much sanctimony about voter ‘disenfranchisement’, to open up the messy prospect of primary re-runs in Florida and Michigan, a last-ditch effort so obviously in bad faith that The New Republic dismissed the idea in an editorial entitled “Stop, Thief”.
There have been less well-reported attacks too. For some time, large numbers of potential voters have been deluged with anonymous emails that claim Obama is a Muslim, or with a photograph that shows him in traditional dress during a 2006 visit to Kenya. There have also been rightwing whispering campaigns to suggest that he is some sort of Trojan horse or Manchurian candidate. Throughout these attacks, the Clintons have done nothing to clear the air. If you consider Obama’s unprompted defence of Joe Biden – when an unguarded remark made the senator sound racist – the contrast couldn’t be greater.
Both Clintons have mocked Obama’s rhetoric as snake oil talk to hide the absence of policy details – a perilous strategy given that the real shortcoming of Obama’s platform is that it is almost indistinguishable from Clinton’s own. Fearing that embarrassing truth, the Clintons seemed to have succumbed to what Sigmund Freud once described as “the narcissism of minor differences” – a pathological hatred, which consumes individuals or groups whose similarities to a rival threaten their sense of self. But whatever their common ground may be in policy matters, not even Clinton’s base would deny that Obama has consistently trumped her in matters of tone and style. Her attempts to counter this have ranged from the snide to the ridiculous (Obama as plagiarist, “change you can xerox”).
Occasionally Clinton has let her inner harridan go a little further. When Obama needled her during a debate about her time on the board of Walmart, she struck back with a sharp albeit factually inaccurate quip about his association with the Chicago slumlord Tony Rezko – a tactic that quickly backfired when a photograph of the Clintons posing with Rezko surfaced a few days later. More recently, her campaign made the most of a highly suspect leak by the Canadian government – that Obama’s comments on Nafta were “political positioning” rather than statements of intent – offering the episode to anyone that would listen as proof positive that Obama is a hypocrite and a manipulator. (The disclosure seems to have played a significant role in Clinton’s victory in Ohio.) Somehow, Obama has avoided getting into a full-fledged tit-for-tat exchange on these matters, but his patience can’t last forever.
Hillary Clinton may yet win the Democratic nomination, but her willingness to regain lost ground through scorched-earth, Rove-style attack campaigning may prove a fatal miscalculation in the long-term. If she loses, she will have essentially have laid the groundwork for his Republican opponents in November. If she stays negative and wins, she could easily alienate enough of Obama’s supporters to make John McCain – a candidate whose victories so far are mostly due to a perfect storm of intra-party squabbling – competitive in many key states.Either way, the “spirit, tenor and purpose” of her campaign leave much to be desired. Barack Obama has never pretended to be perfect, but he has tried to run a campaign that shows a decent respect for the opinions of those who want a new kind of politics in America. Even if the Clintons cannot rise to a respectful rivalry, surely they can offer something better than this.
