James Forsyth James Forsyth

Obama trumps Hillary’s victim card

Hillary Clinton has used her gender brilliantly in the Democratic primaries to date and her campaign has been quick to depict Tuesday night’s debate, which was Hillary’s worst moment of the campaign so far and has sett off lots of chatter about whether she can be stopped after all, as a bunch of dudes beating up on women. (See this very clever web video that they produced). 

But now Obama has hit back

“I am assuming and I hope that Sen. Clinton wants to be treated like everybody else,” the Illinois senator said in an interview with NBC’s ‘Today Show.’

“When we had a debate back in Iowa awhile back, we spent I think the first 15 minutes of the debate hitting me on various foreign policy issues. And I didn’t come out and say: ‘Look, I’m being hit on because I look different from the rest of the folks on the stage'” .
As Ben Smith notes, this complicates things for Hillary as it is hard to play victim when the person attacking you isn’t some unappealing right-wing, white guy but an African-American liberal.

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