Democratic Candidates – Take a Time Out
Hey, as brilliant as Samantha Power may be, she’s got a problem. Calling Hillary Clinton a ‘monster’, no matter how angry she is, demonstrates a lack of diplomacy and experience. Sorry, Barack Obama, but I think she really stepped out of line on this one. Her exact quote:
“She is a monster, too — that is off the record — she is stooping to anything,” Ms Power said, hastily trying to withdraw her remark.
I understand her frustration at feeling as though Hillary Clinton is stooping to anything, but she needs to get a thicker skin because this is child’s play compared to what will be tossed by the swiftboaters and GOP. This is politics and it’s ugly. There are lots of times where it’s so ugly to me I have to step back and away from it for awhile, because the idea of head-butting someone into submission by exaggerating every single tiny detail on the evening news is exhausting. I’m sure Ms. Power felt the same way, particularly after discovering that NAFTA-gate was nothing more than a manufactured tempest-in-a-teapot to disguise the truth of what really happened.
Still, that’s no excuse for blurting out the word ‘monster’ in an on-the-record interview, which the press had the right to publish as an on-the-record statement. (You don’t get to go off the record AFTER you’ve said something stupid.) There’s no excuse, even if the Clinton campaign did try to compare Obama to Ken Starr today, which is also beyond the pale.
With that said, there was some serious video/transcript doctoring done by the Clinton-McCain faction (yes, I’m starting to think that McCain should nominate Hillary for his VP slot), and that’s just as ugly. Susan Rice, appearing on Tucker Carlson’s show today said this:
CARLSON: So Hillary Clinton runs this ad, the famous red phone ad, that says when the phone rings at 3:00 in the morning, you know, who do you trust to make those snap decisions that could hold all of our lives in the balance? And the Obama campaign, I thought very wisely, came back and said, name one that you — you know name a situation where you’ve judged a foreign policy crisis, and she couldn`t.
I’m going to ask the same question to you. Where has — Barack Obama been in a position where he has to make those kinds of decisions?
RICE: He hasn’t and he hasn’t claimed that he’s been in a position to have to answer the phone at 3:00 in the morning in a crisis situation. That’s the difference between the two of them. Hillary Clinton hasn’t had to answer the phone at 3:00 in the morning. And yet she attacked Barack Obama for not being ready. They`re both not ready to have that 3:00 a.m. phone call.
The questions is and what Barack Obama raised is, when that phone call is received for each of them for the first time, who’s going to make the right judgment? Who is going to make the right decision?
On the critical foreign policy issues of the day, whether it was a decision to go to war in Iraq or the decision to give President Bush the benefit of the doubt and beat the drums of war with Iran, Hillary Clinton has made the same wrong judgment as John McCain and George W. Bush. Barack Obama has made a very different judgment.
So neither one of them, and nor John McCain for that matter, have had that 3:00 phone call that others have had. And I think we have to be honest about that.
CARLSON: Well, good for you for saying that. I mean I’ve asked that question of Hillary Clinton supporters and they — rather than just saying she hasn’t, they`’e come up with less believable right.
The Clinton campaign quickly grabbed the ‘out of context’ statement this way:
We agree wholeheartedly that neither Senator Clinton nor Senator Obama have the experience or judgment necessary to lead the United States in the struggle against violent Islamic extremists who seek our destruction, or to address the complex global environment that our next president will face. Only Senator McCain is ready to serve as commander in chief from day one.
Now this selective, out of context manipulation is exactly, precisely why I have such a serious objection to Hillary Clinton’s continuing mantra that “only she and John McCain have the experience on Day One.” If she’s too obtuse to figure out what will be grabbed as a sound bite as she uses it over and over and over again, then she’s truly lost perspective. Perhaps she’s vying for a spot as VP on his ticket? What exactly does she think she’s doing here?
It’s time for a serious time out. A time out that involves BOTH campaigns stepping back and declaring a cease-fire, because as they’re volleying back and forth and their surrogates are volleying back and forth, the net effect is that the voters are caught in the crossfire with the sense that this is no longer about the country’s future, but about theirs. And that’s just wrong.
The battling over the Florida and Michigan delegates, the ratcheting up of the personal attacks, today’s pissing match over electoral votes and delegate counts does the voters absolutely no good at all. It’s just voter suppression, because people get the sense that they are no longer participants in the selection process, but pawns counted by pollsters and lined up in a row to swallow our selective sound bites.
We’re to blame, too. When the man on 60 Minutes parroted back the old saw about Obama being Muslim and not believing in the Pledge of Allegiance, it made me sad for him and our country, because it told me that people were willing to walk into a voting booth without spending any time investigating the facts and truth behind the politician. And it’s out there on all sides to see. There’s more than enough commentary in print and on the web from reputable sources to put two and two together. As long as the electorate is content to watch Fox News and believe what comes out of their slimy little mouths, or MSNBC where they just mostly seem insane with a few exceptions, or CNN where they vascillate between being thorough and glossing over facts, to CBS where they let Hillary Clinton qualify her Muslim answer with “as far as I know” and then turn the discussion on herself and how SHE’d been victimized, etc. etc etc., then we elect who we deserve, and it will likely be McCain.
Really, that’s the bottom line here. Either voters wise up and decide to be informed when they walk into that booth, or we settle yet again. The candidates would do well to facilitate the wising-up process by taking a time out and walking back down a line of demarcation to the straight facts, no chasers.
Technorati Tags: Susan Rice, Jennifer Power, Obama, McCain, Clinton, Starr, distortion, rhetoric, fact, fiction, voter suppression