"This hurts the people of South Carolina." - Bill Clinton Faults Press
Submitted by Nick Kelly on January 24, 2008 - 2:34pm.
Barack Obama | Bill Clinton | Health Care | Hillary Clinton | Media
President Clinton takes on the media in Bill Clinton Faults Press.
He makes a similar point in Obama's Denial For Praising Ronald Reagan.
Clearly, it is the media that really cares about political in-fighting. It's relatively easy for them to hype such stories, rather than taking any in-depth look at real issues and where the candidates differ on them.
For example, how many media stories have you seen doing an in-depth comparison of Obama's health care plan versus that proposed by Hillary Clinton? I haven't seen a single one. Yet, inadequate health care is one of the issues that matters most to voters, whether in South Carolina or anywhere else; and I submit that Hillary's plan is far superior to Obama's in addressing that need responsibly. Indeed, imho, Obama's plan may be more of a benefit to current health insurers than it can reasonably be expected to be to those currently without insurance. See http://securingamerica.com/ccn/node/14482#comment-273948
Perhaps counter-intuitively, all of this media hype, including the disgusting suggestions that the Clintons had played the race card, and Obama's apparent decision to play the victim, may ultimately hurt Obama's candidacy. One thing Obama did not want to become is just another "black presidential candidate". Paradoxically, the looming possibility of a great racial divide in the South Carolina vote, may cause some voters to begin to see him as just that. Jesse Jackson won the SC primaries in 1984 and 1988. Over at Black Voices there is concern about a South Carolina win by Obama becoming a "Pyhrric victory".
The first-in-the-South Democratic presidential primary will be held in South Carolina on Saturday. Polls show that Sen. Barack Obama has a double digit lead over Sen. Hillary Clinton. African Americans, who make up half of Democratic voters, overwhelmingly support Obama, 65 percent to Clinton's 16 percent.
There is, however, a racial divide in voters' preferences. Obama trails both Clinton and John Edwards among white voters. While Obama will likely win the primary without significant white support, it will be a Pyrrhic victory. He will have won the battle but lost the war against morphing into the "black presidential candidate."
It's a shame that all of this is affecting the campaigns of some very fine Democrats in perhaps the most important election in my lifetime. Bill Clinton is correct. The media should be ashamed of themselves.
I hit the REC button after reading only "President Clinton takes on the Media"! Felt good!
Now I'll go read what I rec'd. :)
I wish I could rec it three times.
Excellent analysis.
I think the empty and even harmful victory idea that Jackson suggested is accurate. I'm sure it was never Obama's intent to have this devolve into racial divides. I too point my finger directly at the corporate press.
And somewhere-- behind it all --there is glee, there are camps that are celebrating. The ones who revel in divide and conquer tactics. The ones who knew it was going to take an electoral miracle to overcome being in a suddenly grossly unpopular party, with only 30% approval, being without any viable or charismatic candidates in their lineup, and having been caught and called out already on previous voter suppression and election fraud - with new watchdogs in place making it nearly impossible to steal it like before...what to do?
When all else fails- divide and conquer. Mission accomplished.
The favored method of the wealthy few in so many instances. It worked over and over for the Lords and Ladies, and now it's becoming a standard tool of their wealthy friends in America.
True democrats and all fellow humanitarians must understand and resist this.
Thanks, ms.
Nick Kelly
Wes Clark still could be the national security candidate.
It will be up to all of us to truly try to focus on the opposites -
To unite and conquer.
Or we will surely get sucked in to the maelstrom and lose our shot at the White House.
We need to find new and creative methods to keep emphasizing the commonalities, the higher good, the Democratic principals we embrace that are not in conflict. Shifting the focus back where it belongs.
But it's just so hard with all this noise... :(
this on GD thread, but think this is a relevant place to put it, too.
It is very clear that the CW is the Clintons are the ones making things up, lying, bringing in the race card, hurting the party, etc. But the reality is Obama and his campaign are using "dirty" campaign tactics that up to now, most of the press has given him a pass on. He is not, despite his supporters beliefs and wishes, the innocent, poor, attacked new/change guy he presents himself as. As pointed out, the Clinton campaign could very well call him a liar, but so far I haven't heard them say that. Can't say the same for his campaign.
It's a long post, but very informative, and extensively linked.
http://www.theleftcoaster.com/archives/011805.php
Once in a while you get shown the light, In the strangest of places if you look at it right.
...is one of the worst and propagating these lies....
A reader at Leftcoaster calls him on it...
I called his show today and spoke with him on air about this problem because he had said in his opening monologue that Bob Kerry had stated that Obama was a Muslim, which is patently false, and I read him Kerry's direct comment. Schultz stated that he did not make the statement in his opening, but he did exactly what I repeated to him, and I listened to his exact words as I streamed the show in another time zone. Schultz was correct that he didn't say that Kerry had stated that Obama was Muslim in his opening prepared statement, Schultz said it in his off the cuff follow-up to his own written monologue. Schultz also proferred the Bill Clinton "fairy tale" remark offered by Michelle Obama in a campaign appearance in which she incorrectly stated that Bill Clinton had stated that Obama's campaign was a "fairy tale," which we all know is untrue. The comment was about Senator Obama's☼ votes on the war, but Mr. Schultz also neglected to present the entire quote, just as Tim Russert and Mrs. Obama had done.There have been many, many more outbursts by Schultz lately, which are just bad for the party, let alone Mrs. Clinton, who, let's face it, will be the nominee.
I don't want a Republican president and/or a Republican-dominated congress, so somebody needs to tell Ed Schultz to "cool it," as he is influencing millions of voters, not to mention the fact that he most assuredly is helping the Republican attack machine, which will rear its ugly head in due time. If I wanted to listen to a radio host rant about the "evil" Clintons, I'd listen to reich wing radio...
http://www.theleftcoaster.com/archives/011808.php
"The Right always knows who its enemies are" Lance Mannion
over at Kos
Ed Schultz- the "Leftie"
From Wikipedia:
Schultz's political views leaned towards the right during the early years, and Schultz told the Los Angeles Times that he "lined up with the Republicans because they were anti-tax--"He pondered a run as a Republican for the U.S. House of Representatives against Democratic Rep. Earl Pomeroy in 1994, but decided against it.
Since then, he claims to have become a Democrat in 2000, although he supported several Republican candidates in that year's election.
Schultz is also opposed to abortion and gay marriage.
Sounds to me like he should endorse Huckabee. Heh.
...people who are acceptable to quote?
One-by-one, the darlings of the Democrats become the anti-Clintons here on the CCN.
and take whatever heat may come.
Ed Shultz sure ain't nobody's darling (cept for his very own Herself - :) ), and he can take the heat.
You're not saying that Clinton supporters should just stuff it when the Clinton's get criticized, are you?
And far as that goes, I've seen plenty of criticism of the Clintons here also.
Nick Kelly
Wes Clark still could be the national security candidate.
My Be the Change USA organization brought Schultz here to speak at one of our events. Those who picked him up and "took care of him" didn't enjoy the experience.
Stan Davis
Lakewood, CO
Wes Clark -- Make America All It Can Be!
At one time, I would have been surprised.
Not anymore
"The Right always knows who its enemies are" Lance Mannion
....has never been the "darling" of the lefties. He was always at best tolerated. His problem always has been his habit of buying into the "spin" without checking out the facts.....on almost every issue. I remember very well the tirades against him at Kos because of this......diary after diary of how he was really a Republican in sheep's clothing.
Oh how the times have changed.
OTOH, Paul Krugman has always been the "darling" of the left, and deservedly so. He was the lone voice in the wilderness.......long before KO.
Of course now he is no longer acceptable to Obama supporters since he dares to criticize him on SS and his healthcare plan.....which, dare I say, are strictly policy differences.
Shultz, otoh never mentions Hillary's policies. No, it's much more personal and venial with him.....stemming, I think, from her "failure" to appearing on his show.
"The Right always knows who its enemies are" Lance Mannion
Go to the orange place to find the long list of current unacceptables. Anyone who does not support or elevate Obama is anathema. Anyone who lays off the Clintons or refuses to indulge in the issues of the cackle, the so called "crying" (I never did see tears, crying is what Boehner did, what HW did) or the blatant racism of acknowledging Johnson alongside MLK or the blatant racism of saying his anti Iraq record is spotty and inconsistent... Those are the anti-Obamas. It's so silly and I'm sorry for all of us that we are sucked into this .... yet another faux 'war'.
The New York Times just slipped onto the list at kos now. Do not trust anyone who does not slam anything named Clinton.
I am currently worried for the legacy of Ambassador Joe Wilson - one of the only people from the inside with the courage to step up and call the prelude to the war for what it was... BS.
So given his and his wife's service-- it's sad it could all be discounted in the netroots because of his one endorsement. He merits our respect even more than Ed I feel.
Wes has been dragged through such mud as well. Did you know his only reason for endorsing her was to nab himself some juicy position and as a calculated career move. RFK same thing. They are all only acting in self interest. Each and every former hero and "darling" of the progressive set at Orange Town. Wes merits our respect even more than Ed. And Wes helped Ed unconditionally ....
I supported Ed with Wes to get him back on Armed Forces radio. But from his first days on the air here, I struggled and eventually had to choose not to listen. This was many years before and independent of this primary or Wes's HRC endorsement. My issue at the time was election integrity... I'd spent all my precious spare hours researching and writing ---took one year before concluding that, Houston we have a problem in this country.
Ed systematically dismissed even the notion that there was a security issue in the electronic equipment as Conspiracy and refused not only to let people discuss it on the air, but flat out insisted (as Kos did at the time) that anyone exploring the issue was a whacko nutjob. My year of study and findings was dismissed in a single Stalinesque stroke as "delusional". It may be a small issue, but I took it personally at the time... my prerogative as a listener-- So I turned him off then.
Like all "progressives", and like Kos, he has now come around and acknowledges it is a valid issue, us nutjobs were right all along ... he was just way behind the curve but that is, like I say, only MY problem with him.
Haven't listened for years because I find, in comparison to Thom Hartmann (Not a Hillary supporter) or Randi Rhodes (not Hillary warm); he doesn't read enough, doesn't do his homework, isn't progressive on most issues, and he seldom exhibits a broad scope of knowledge on any of the issues, except maybe fishing and sports. So I turn the dial.
You can quote him all you like though! Common sense tell us, should you have some really nasty snip about General Clark's candidate he's working to promote... might be best to think first about framing your post.
Sorry gordon, big Ed the Lefty has never been my darling... ever. My darlings on radio are Thom Hartmann and Rachel Maddow - neither one pro Clinton but both offer thoughtful, well researched analyses of the candidates and the issues that are refreshingly adult and fair minded. They are NOT for Clinton but at the same time they never indulge in any gratuitous swipes at any of our candidates on the Dem side. And Oh how I love that. : )
.
was called senile, gone mad because of some personal loss, and old enough to be dead when he endorsed Hillary. Seems the anti-Hillarys are the one throwing the real progressive heroes under the bus over and over again.
"The mark of leadership is not to standup when everybody is standing, but rather to actually stand up when no one else is standing" - Pulitzer Prize winning author Samantha Power, introducing Gen Clark
Obama re Reagan:
..."He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it"
..."I think people, he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.”
What exactly is Obama's conclusion here, he hated Reagan?
Isn't Obama essentially comparing himself with Reagan?
Now Obama says he did not say he liked Reagan... why bring Reagan up at all - George Washington also put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it.
Every time Bill Clinton holds the journalist responsible for his/her question, BC is then described as attacking - yes, we have grown accustom to the msm confronted with truth - truth equals attacking.
It's what people do when the truth won't service them. Obama has it to an art form.
Thirty thousand people have been spending almost a week now trying to fill in, interpret, decipher and decode JUST WHAT OBAMA MEANT when he said what he said about Reagan.... and none of them have agreed yet.
What does that tell you?
All he had to do to avoid this confusion - if he'd wanted to avoid it- was to speak clearly and drop the veil of vagueness when discussing hot button issues. Like Ronald Reagan.
Hillary could never have gotten away with calling the Bush family a family of "ideas" - she could barely get off with a lightweight second-hand compliment to Lyndon Johnson for passing civil rights legislation.
If you want to court a right of center base and avoid pissing off the progressives at the same time... you've got to cheat a little. CYA. Leave wide gaping gulfs of your message conspicuously 'open to interpretation'.
He could SO EASILY have prevented this by adding some teeny weeny little qualifier about not approving of those changes, not wanting those same kinds of changes for our world today or any of 100 such statements. Would've taken 30 seconds, avoided the ambiguous mess he's now in, and made his stance crystal clear on the Reagan reign. IF HE HAD WANTED TO BE CLEAR. And given his academic resume... I would venture he has ample training in clarity of message in public speaking.
But he didn't. He wanted to be vague.
Keeps him in the 'safe zone' vis a vis the conservative voters. Now he's just sweeping up the mess retroactively.
Were he not running against someone who can spot those fuzzy lobs a mile away, he might get away with it. But he's volleying with Hillary Clinton. She's got to call him on it.
He left himself wide open and he did it intentionally to try to get two differing groups of people to both see him as their guy. Gee-- isn't that called "triangulating" in some circles??
...at Democratic Strategist...
But if Big Media probably shouldn't be blamed for Edwards' travails, I personally think they have played a major role in the "racialization" of the Clinton-Obama rivalry. It's significant that all the race-talk began on the night of the NH primary, when the networks gave exceptional (and IMO, unmerited) credence to the "Bradley-Wilder Effect" of hidden voter racism as an explanation for Clinton's upset win. I know some people blame the Clinton campaign for "racialization," but it should be fairly obvious that if her campaign wanted to "go there," it would have done so prior to the vote in the whiter-shade-of-pale states of IA and NH. Maybe the race-talk was inevitable in any contest including Obama, and maybe identity-based voting is higher than it otherwise would be in a competition where actual policy differences were visible to anyone other than the most serious wonks. But Big Media definitely let the race-genie out of the bottle, and it's unclear when or whether it can be bottled back up.
http://www.thedemocraticstrategist.org/strategist/2008/01/big_medias_sins.php
"The Right always knows who its enemies are" Lance Mannion
It's always risky to rely on my faulty short-term memory, but the way I remember it, it was black Obama supporters who started it in their reactions to Clinton's Johnson-King, Jr. comment. They thought she was demeaning King.
Hillary could have mitigated the problem by adding in her comment that King raised awareness, roused passion, and created a movement, but that nothing would have happened without congressional and presidential action, "and I'll be the same kind of President -- one who solves problems and makes things happen."
So the media, loving a controversy, allowed the black Obama supporters to pour gasoline on the media fire.
Stan Davis
Lakewood, CO
Wes Clark -- Make America All It Can Be!
on Hillary's "crying" moment. He said, 'I'll bet she didn't cry about Katrina.'
He that plants trees loves others besides himself. ~English Proverb
with this YouTube video:
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Story?id=2963398&page=1
I'm not saying that had any direct link to their much more recent use of the race card - only that it's pretty clear that some in the Obama camp will say some pretty negative things to try to stop Hillary.
Also, it's enlightening to see the gracious manner with which Hillary responded to this particular negative video:
After initially declining to comment on the ad, today Clinton offered this response: "I haven't seen it but I'm pleased that it seems to be taking attention away from what used to be on YouTube and getting a lot of hits, namely me singing "The Star Spangled Banner," Clinton told NY1.
"Everybody in the world now knows I can't carry a tune," joked Clinton. "I thank heavens for small favors and the attention has shifted, and now maybe people won't have to tune in and hear me screeching about "The Star Spangled Banner," she said.
In a nod to YouTube's appeal to young people, Clinton said, "I think anything that drives interest in these campaigns and gets people who otherwise are not at all interested in politics, I think that's pretty good."
When asked if she would like to see the video removed, she said, "I might quibble a little bit about the content," said Clinton, "but if we get more people, especially young people thinking about politics, I'm happy about that."
Finally, this post was intended to be a response to Stan's observation regarding the race card, but I hit the wrong reply box. Perhaps that's just as well, since it's important to recognize that the Obama camp has long been engaging in a whole variety of negative attacks on Hillary - not just the recent race card matter.
Nick Kelly
Wes Clark still could be the national security candidate.
Nobody in the media has done an in depth analysis of anything. I am a former conservative republican who erroneously voted for GWB twice now and after reading HRC's proposal for health care and everything else, believe she is the most prepared candidate of all.
Right now SHE has the substance. Obama has the charisma but I don't know if he has substance beyond that.
Its really hard to get a sense of what the candidates really want to do during this short debates or even their speeches. If the voters would look at her proposal more in depth, I can't imagine they would choose anyone else.
She has the experience, talent, and drive to do what is best for the country.
The media really look worse than ever!