Clinton Camp Pulls Negative Radio Ad, But Defends It All The While
Hillary Clinton's campaign today pulled a radio ad off the air in South Carolina that quoted Barack Obama calling the GOP the "party of ideas." But top Clinton advisers firmly defended the spot this afternoon in a conference call with reporters.
"I have yet to hear what Sen. Obama, what ideas he was talking about specifically when he said the Republican Party was the party of ideas," said Howard Wolfson, communications director for the Clinton campaign. "Let him come forward and say, here are the ideas I was talking about, instead of saying President Clinton was a liar."
Clinton consultant Mark Penn added: "He was pitching and pandering to a conservative-leaning ed board to get their endorsement. This was not a comment at a JFK symposium on government."
The spiked Clinton ad uses Obama's remarks, made early this month in a meeting with editors from the Reno Gazette-Journal, to link him to policies that would potentially be unpopular with Democratic voters.
"Aren’t those the ideas that got us into the economic mess we’re in today?" a narrator asks in the Clinton ad. "Ideas like special tax breaks for Wall Street. Running up a $9 trillion debt. Refusing to raise the minimum wage or deal with the housing crisis. Are those the ideas Barack Obama’s talking about?”
Bill Burton, an Obama spokesman, said the ad was "dishonest" -- and several media publications, including ABC News and the Washington Post reported that, at best, the spot stretched the truth.
"Regardless of their confused retreat -- the ad was dishonest, the attack is disingenuous and I think we’re all just getting tired of the Clinton campaign’s penchant to absolutely say or do anything to win this election," Burton said.
This afternoon's ad spat -- don't forget Obama's campaign had already countered with a radio spot in S.C. that said HRC "would say anything to get elected" -- marked the latest tit-for-tat confrontation between the rivals in this increasingly personal fight for the Democratic nomination.
Also on the call, HRC advisers blamed Obama for dragging former President Clinton into the brawl. The Obama folks have said that HRC is using her husband on the campaign trail as her attack dog -- and they've fought back accordingly, responding to what they believe are his misrepresentations of the Illinois senator's record, on the war in Iraq, in particular.
But Wolfson called Obama's comments this week to respond to the former president a "sub rosa" attempt "to drive criticism and negativity of President Clinton."
"Voters, I think, are going to judge someone who started out this campaign promising a politics of hope, a new kind of politics, who is now questioning the veracity of the former president," Wolfson said.
Though reporters probed for a reason the Clinton campaign pulled the ad, Wolfson and Penn wouldn't bite. They stressed that the ad used Obama's own words and rejected any suggestion that the ad had taken Obama's statement out of context.
(JENNIFER SKALKA)
Clinton Rule of Politics #244: It's always someone else's fault.
Jennifer,
It's long been apparent to me, as a fairly experienced observer and sometime bit player, that every Wolfson quote is at best content-free, tenuously relevant, and thinly connected to the truth, and should be understood only as a purely cynical manipulation of appearances in support of his cause. Red herrings, straw men, talk radio-style smears and fallacies, etc., etc. And all this to a far greater degree than is usual for those in his line of work.
Most readers -- even of the Hotline, and certainly of many other news sources whose writers read the Hotline -- are less rigorously skeptical than I am. I believe you do them (not to mention, you know, journalism, your immortal soul, democracy and America) a disservice by printing anything Wolfson ever says. Seriously. His job may be to get you to propagate his words, but your job is not to oblige. I would say that you should generally refuse to print any spin from any flak, but when it becomes void of any relation to honest truth, as with Wolfson, the rule should become absolute.
The idea that quoting spin from all sides somehow makes up for the fundamental and deliberate dishonesty of what you quote is unsupportable. Two wrongs don't make a right, and two or three or five false pictures don't make a true picture.
Also, I'm interested in your take on how many mid-to-high-level reporters actually buy how much Wolfsonian-type spin, and would much appreciate it if you could address this at some point. I'm hoping that the answer is "None, of course," but I've seen too much high-level incompetence and idiocy in too many fields to have any real confidence that it's so. (Present company certainly excluded. I doubt that Mike Pride would have kept you around for a week, let alone put you on Capital Beat, if you weren't sharp enough yourself. And Elias's parents seem to agree, which is at least as good a standard as any. (Yeah, that's about as obscure and cryptic as they come. But I'm only trying to name-drop to you, not to the rest of the universe.))