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The two sides of the Obama campaign

James Forsyth

Sunday, 20th April 2008

John Dickerson has a great Slate column on how the Obama campaign it while deploring the old politics is quite happy to practise it. As Dickerson writes:

“I'm going to stand behind Senator Obama when he speaks. When he's decrying the trivial distractions in politics, I think he may be crossing his fingers behind his back.
As the Senator's campaign train wound from one speech where he denounced tit-for-tat politics to the next speech where he denounced tit-for-tat politics, his campaign hosted a conference call to engage in the practice the candidate was busy denouncing. I suppose it would have been an even greater act of chutzpah for the Obama campaign to host the conference call while Sen. Obama was denouncing that kind of behavior, but not much more of one.
Obama campaign aides scheduled the call to talk about Hillary Clinton's fantastical story about her breakneck race to shelter under sniper fire during a visit to Bosnia. You might think this would be the last story the Obama campaign would be pushing, because in Wednesday's debate the Senator mistakenly suggested his campaign had only discussed the issue because reporters had brought it up, not because they were trying to take advantage of Clinton's extended work of fiction. To push the story again now would make Obama look even more insincere about that claim.”

Indeed, in this Bosnia conference call one of the participants even said that Hillary would “lack the moral authority to lay the wreath on Memorial Day” following this story. To be fair, the Obama campaign did disown the statement but it is proof that the Clinton campaign doesn’t have a monopoly on hyperbolic criticism or negativity.

The same double standard can be seen in the Obama campaign both trying to rule any remarks about Bill Ayers, the unrepentant member of the Weather Underground who Obama has“friendly relations with”, out of bounds while comparing Ayers to his Senate colleague Tom Coburn, who while supporting outlawing abortion has never taken any action outside the law.