Will Clinton's Obama Attacks Backfire?

[DeepModem Mom]

TIME: Will Clinton's Obama Attacks Backfire?
By JAY NEWTON-SMALL/WASHINGTON

It started in earnest a couple of weeks ago when Hillary Clinton questioned how much Barack Obama's time spent living in Indonesia as a child could actually help him make foreign policy decisions as a commander-in-chief. "Voters will judge whether living in a foreign country at the age of 10 prepares one to face the big, complex international challenges the next President will face," Clinton said November 20 in Shenandoah, Iowa. "I think we need a President with more experience than that."

Then Clinton announced in an interview with CBS that she was sick of being a punching bag for Obama and former North Carolina Senator John Edwards and that she intended to fight back. "After you have been attacked as often as I have from several of my opponents, you cannot just absorb it. You have to respond," she said.

Since that declaration Clinton has done just that, attacking Obama's plans for health care, Social Security reform and diplomacy with Iran. She even went so far as to dig up a kindergarten essay of Obama's entitled "I Want to Be President" to accuse him of lying about not having a lifelong lust for the Oval Office. "So you decide which makes more sense: Entrust our country to someone who is ready on day one ... or to put America in the hands of someone with little national or international experience, who started running for president the day he arrived in the U.S. Senate," Clinton said in Iowa Monday. But at a time when two new Iowa polls show Obama actually pulling into the lead and Clinton losing support among women, some political observers are wondering if Clinton will come to regret her newly assertive strategy. She already has the highest negative ratings in the race, and the shift in tactics comes only a month before the Iowa caucus — where voters are famous for their distaste of negative campaigning. Launching the attacks herself, rather than with via surrogates, only makes the move even riskier.

"The attack will backfire in two ways: it will reinforce the negative stereotype of Mrs. Clinton as a cold and calculating person who will do whatever it takes to win," said Stephen J. Wayne, a government professor at Georgetown University and author of The Road to the White House. "And two, it will make Mr. Obama seem to be the less shrill and more emotionally mature candidate."...

***

Clinton's harsh new rhetoric has not won much support, either from pundits or other Democrats. "I could see the desire to raise the salience of personal traits — because her strengths are experience and strength of character," said Stephen Ansolabehere, a political science professor at MIT and author of the book Going Negative. "But her choice surprised me — she might be emphasizing the wrong thing. Given how close this is in the polls, especially a month out, this might be a very risky strategy for her."...Perhaps the biggest downside to Clinton's negative attacks is that the press seems to be focusing on nothing else, at least for the moment. "What's tough about the stories from this weekend is that they're telegraphing — they're more about going negative than the substance of the attacks," Simmons said....

http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1690519,00.html?xid=site-cnn-partner

[AX10]

1. Why should they backfire? Obama's attacks have worked quite well.

Also, why should we care about what the pundits like and don't like? They are elitists who are out for themeselves.

[aquart]

2. Uh huh. No mention of Obama's "present" votes on women's issues?

Funny how that gets lost in all this MSM anointing of Hillary as the candidate. Yeah, that's what they're doing. She's their choice all right. Uh huh.

[AX10]

4. The punditry is pushing Obama because...

they know that he can be defeated in the General Election. When Charles Krauthammer and Andy Sullivan speak highly of him, you know something is wrong with that.

[blm]

3. Kerry was a child in Germany after WW2 and learned quite a bit from the experience

as the country was dividing in two.

[karynnj]

7. I agree

In Tour of Duty, some of his reflections on his perception of the Vietnamese people allude to his mom's reaction to the destruction of her family's estate in WWII when she saw it when he was 4. He also wrote of his recognition of how the small kids hated their stopping all the boats on the canals and making a tough life tougher. I thought of those comments written when he was 25, when he explained better than anyone else the problem - on both the US and Iraqi side - of the US doing the inspections. It was risky for him to push this, but he did change the view of the country on whether this was appropriate. (He was the first to show it as bad from the soldiers POV as well as hurting the Iraqis.)

There was also the story of him bicycling into East Berlin as a 10 year old. Seeing the difference in the prosperity and the emotional tones of the people obviously made an impact. It also made it very easy to see why his parents grounded him and why sending him to school in Switzerland was a good idea! His acceptance of other cultures and being able to see things from their perspective informed his foreign policy ideas in his 1966 Yale speech to his editorial on Lebanon written earlier this year.

Everyones life impacts their world view. As the campaign goes on it will be interesting to see more evidence of how Obama's different life experiences impacted him and led to his beliefs.

[MethuenProgressive]

5. Who was just on the cover of TIME? Hmmm... Who was it? Who was it?

The MSM hates the Clintons. Always have. Always will.
She said she was sick of being a punching bag, she said she'd fight back, and now BARACK/TIME '08 Inc. whines she's doing what she said she would?
Pft.

[PATRICK]

6. "her choice surprised me"

So much for a well planned effective campaign. This is not the first time either. The responses about the
"meeting with Iran's leaders" were not deft or exploitive and the extended exchange left her permanently touting how many meetings she has had in her expereince with world leaders. reactive and not always well done and too much aftereffects.

You can complain about Edwards' negative attacks, but they did not sputter on and their memory develop a disquieting aftertaste or wavering confidence. Telegraphing speaks of campaign incompetence at more than one level. The Clinton campaign may be unnecessarily stuck on the primacy of the big media picture at risk of real live performance.

[killbotfactory]

8. She wants to take him down like Gephardt did to Dean

and then rebound in NH and South Carolina.