Clinton Returns to the Gutter

Having been caught in an apparent lie about her trip to Bosnia, Hillary Clinton has chosen to take a swipe at Barack Obama over the Jeremiah Wright controversy:

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, in a wide-ranging interview today with Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reporters and editors, said she would have left her church if her pastor made the sort of inflammatory remarks Sen. Barack Obama’s former pastor made.

“He would not have been my pastor,” Clinton said. “You don’t choose your family, but you choose what church you want to attend.”

Obama’s lead in national polls had slipped since clips of the retired Rev. Jeremiah Wright began being played on national news programs, but he has since rebounded, according to a Gallup poll. …

Waiting until the fuss is dying down, leaving Obama pretty much unscathed, and then pouncing? That is low:

When the controversy surrounding some of Jeremiah Wright’s sermons first erupted a couple of weeks ago, the Clinton campaign went out of its way to say absolutely nothing about the story publicly. If a reporter brought it up during one of the campaign’s many conference calls, you could practically hear tumbleweeds rolling. The flap was undermining the Obama campaign, and Team Clinton saw no need whatsoever to intervene.

This was, to my mind, the right call. Given the racial elements of the campaign thus far, it would have been a huge risk for the Clinton campaign to be seen stoking the same fires as Fox News. Yes, Ickes & Co. were using it with superdelegates, but that’s behind the scenes. The public pitch was different: “When Clinton was then asked specifically if her campaign was pushing the Wright story — she shrugged and took the next question, ignoring the reporter.”

That was five whole days ago. The desperation factor has apparently grown more intense.
[…]
It’s hard to overstate how disappointing this is. Clinton waited until the story had died down and then decided to make her first public comments on the controversy, going after Obama for staying with his church.

I know Clinton is willing to fight as hard as possible for his nomination, but tactics like these are pretty low.

There’s been a lot of talk on the left side of blogtopia about presenting a united front and not tearing our side’s candidates down. It’s a legitimate goal, but antics like this don’t help — and I really don’t see why Clinton should get a pass on this kind of bad behavior. I also am truly at a loss to explain why she pulls these kinds of stunts. She’s done it so many times before, and it never puts her ahead the way she seems to think it will. Quite the contrary. It’s like she’s trying to sabotage herself. It’s self-destructive.

Maybe she’s getting bad advice, but you know what? She’s not stupid. This is the candidate who is supposed to be sooooo experienced and so politically savvy. These are not savvy choices she is making. So maybe Andrew Sullivan is right, and this is simply who she is.

BooMan takes Clinton to the woodshed:

Hillary Clinton has gone too far. In a conversation with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Clinton presumed to tell Barack Obama where he should worship his God. She suggested that Reverend Wright is guilty of ‘hate speech’ and compared him to Don Imus.
[…]
Hillary Clinton has a lot of gall to question her opponent’s choice of church considering her own kooky associations. And I think it would be equally repulsive if Barack Obama chose to make an issue of her decision to worship with Sam Brownback and Rick ‘Man on Dog’ Santorum. Obama certainly could question her faith and what her faith suggests about her political commitments. As Kathryn Joyce and Jeff Sharlet reported in Mother Jones last fall…

Clinton’s prayer group was part of the Fellowship (or “the Family”), a network of sex-segregated cells of political, business, and military leaders dedicated to “spiritual war” on behalf of Christ, many of them recruited at the Fellowship’s only public event, the annual National Prayer Breakfast. (Aside from the breakfast, the group has “made a fetish of being invisible,” former Republican Senator William Armstrong has said.) The Fellowship believes that the elite win power by the will of God, who uses them for his purposes. Its mission is to help the powerful understand their role in God’s plan.

[…]
But Barack Obama has not made Clinton’s kooky right-wing church into an issue on the campaign trail because he understands that a person’s faith is an intensely personal and (hopefully) non-political affair.

Clinton’s decision to question Obama’s choice of church is a bigger problem than her personal tastelessness. Her decision is an arrow aimed directly at the heart of the black community. It is one of the worst acts of public betrayal I have ever seen committed by a Democratic politician in my lifetime, and the most shortsighted and toxic decision I can recall.

White Americans may be surprised by their introduction to the style of black sermonizing in the figure of Rev. Wright, but the black community sees nothing particularly out of place in his rhetoric. This may or may not be a political vulnerability in the general election, but a far greater vulnerability is opened up by telling the black church-going community that Rev. Wright is the equivalent of Don Imus and his ‘nappy-headed hos’. The suggestion that Rev. Wright was engaged in ‘hate speech’ of a kind so loathsome as to require leaving his church is deeply offensive. The black community is feeling besieged by the national spotlight on Rev. Wright and the ensuing white backlash. They are looking around for allies, and find Hillary Clinton piling on and throwing them under the bus.

Clinton is not only presumptuous, she is vicious and divisive and hurtful. She should be defending Barack Obama against unfair attacks, and defending and contextualizing the tradition of black sermonizing. In his speech, Barack Obama sought to educate and bring reconciliation. Clinton’s response is to throw it all back in his face and suggest that there is something wrong with him for attending his church.

If Clinton succeeds in pushing this racial polarization to the point that white people will not vote for Obama, the black community will never, ever, forgive her. This is especially true because she can only win on the backs of the superdelegates.

At this point it is absolutely imperative that the party leaders step in and stop the Clinton campaign from inflicting lasting damage to the relationship between the party and the African-American community. She cannot be allowed to even try to win the nomination this way, let alone actually win it.

This is poison of the worst possible kind. It will destroy the party’s electoral viability more swiftly and more surely than anything I can think of.

I call on Speaker Pelosi, Majority Leader Reid, Chairman Dean, and the other leaders of the party top step in right now and call this contest.

The Clintons absolutely must not be permitted to do this. It must be stopped.

David Brooks (of all people) points out that the only winner in all this is John McCain — and it seems Clinton really does want him to be elected.

Oh, and about that Bosnia trip: Chris Bowers is bemused by Clinton’s explanation for why she “remembered” running through sniper fire that never happened. She said, “I was sleep-deprived, and I misspoke.”

… I really like that last line. I mean, if you are arguing that you are better at answering the red phone at 3 a.m., it seems like a really good idea to claim that you misspoke about national security experience because you were too tired. It really instills a lot of confidence in the 3 a.m. claim.

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