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Written by Web Master
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Saturday, 12 June 2004 11:54 |
 When Barack Obama's top strategist, David Axelrod, spoke to reporters
on a conference call Wednesday, you could hear a siren in the
background. It was just the usual city sounds outside of his Chicago
office, but it matched the emergency tone of the call. In the wake of
Obama's three losses in Ohio, Texas, and Rhode Island, Axelrod was
opening up a new, aggressive front against Hillary Clinton. He spooled
out a string of accusations about her
undisclosed tax returns and White House records as if he'd been holding his breath for the last 12 months. In fact, he has. This was a public attack unlike any the campaign has issued before. "She is a habitual nondiscloser," said Axelrod, even as he criticized the Clinton campaign for running a "scorched earth" series of attacks on Obama recently.
The next day, Clinton's communications director, Howard Wolfson, followed with the political equivalent of Godwin's law by charging that the Obama campaign was imitating Ken Starr. At this rate, the campaigns will be trading expletives by April (that's already happening inside the Clinton campaign). If anything will save us from a perpetual seven-week harangue before the key Pennsylvania primary, it's that the penalty for going negative has increased at the same time that the candidates are increasingly tempted to push each other down the stairs. Instead of full-throttle, we may instead see each candidate with one foot on the gas and one foot on the brake over the next stretch.
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Last Updated on Saturday, 08 March 2008 19:17 |
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