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The Republican National Committee has commissioned polling and focus groups to determine the boundaries of attacking a minority or female candidate, according to people involved.

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GOP operatives have already coined a term for clumsy rhetoric: “undisciplined messaging.” It appears as a bullet point in a Power Point presentation making the rounds among major donors, party leaders and surrogates.

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"Undiciplined messaging" what a great little term. Presumably, once they have decided just how far they can push the envelope themselves, they can farm out their more "undiciplined messages" to the usual more arms length entities, where they can shake their heads sadly with plausible deniability.

[ 25 February 2008: Message edited by: oldgoat ]

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Obama campaign manager David Plouffe accused the Clinton campaign Monday of "shameful offensive fear-mongering" by circulating a photo as an attempted smear.

Plouffe was reacting to a banner headline on the Drudge Report saying that aides to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) had e-mailed a photo calling attention to the African roots of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.).

"The photo, taken in 2006, shows the Democrat front-runner dressed as a Somali Elder, during his visit to Wajir, a rural area in northeastern Kenya," the Drudge Report said.

The Clinton campaign did not deny the charge, but did not comment further.

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[ 25 February 2008: Message edited by: martin dufresne ]

And here's the Clinton campaign's response. Notice no denial. Just a complaint that they got caught.

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If Barack Obama's campaign wants to suggest that a photo of him wearing traditional Somali clothing is divisive, they should be ashamed. Hillary Clinton has worn the traditional clothing of countries she has visited and had those photos published widely.

This is nothing more than an obvious and transparent attempt to distract from the serious issues confronting our country today and to attempt to create the very divisions they claim to decry.

We will not be distracted.

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http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/

[ 25 February 2008: Message edited by: josh ]

[ 25 February 2008: Message edited by: martin dufresne ]

She knows she's going down and is simply grasping at any straw she can grasp. One moment she says during the debate with Obama "I'm honored to be sitting next to Barack Obama" the next few days she's openly mocking him in a very theatrical, over-the-top manner.

Bush-Cheney lite indeed.

Interesting to see Hillary Clinton forgive the Drudge Report site and now even passing documents to him instead.

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That people in Mrs. Clinton’s campaign orbit would tip off the Drudge Report to its fund-raising numbers is in part a reflection of her pragmatic approach to dealing with potential enemies, like Newt Gingrich or Rupert Murdoch. But it also speaks to the enduring power of the Drudge Report, which mixes original reporting with links to newspaper, Internet or television reports far and wide.

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Ah so nice to see former enemies become useful allies.

[ 25 February 2008: Message edited by: contrarianna ]

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Originally posted by mary123:

Don't be surprised to see Clinton going negative in a big way these next few days before the March elections. Clinton's mantra "Go negative or go home!!!"

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Or Clinton's "35 years of experience." She has had a distinguished record of public service, but it's not in any way 35 years of government experience, unless you want to include her time at Yale Law school, or going door to door for George McGovern in Texas, or working at the Rose law firm in Arkansas as government experience. But her campaign seemed convinced that by repeating "35 years of experience" at every stop she would magically acquire that 35 years of experience.

But as the Bush administration has shown, believing your own words and not being able to see things as they are is not a good thing -- either for a country or a campaign. The New York Times described some Clinton aides as "baffled that a candidate who had been in the United States Senate for only three years and was a state lawmaker in Illinois before that was now outpacing a seasoned figure like Mrs. Clinton."

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Clinton has run a piss poor campaign that is embarrassing for a presidential nomininee. If she campaigns so very poorly and so very disorganized at this stage of the game .....

Obama has backed up his words so far by running a great, organized campaign and not blowing big bucks indulging themselves in expensive catering events like the Clinton campaign has hehe.

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As Matt Yglesias says:

"Whether or not you think the more 'seasoned' candidate ought to win presidential elections, it seems to me that any campaign staffer who could be genuinely 'baffled' by experience not proving to be a winning issue is demonstrating a scary ignorance of how things work. Is her staff baffled that Joe Biden didn't win the nomination?"

Or how about the Clinton campaign's abracadabra rhetoric, designed to make the reality of what they agreed to about Florida and Michigan -- poof! -- go away. They even set up a website that attempts to pull a rabbit out of the electoral hat. The site list several "facts": "FACT: Florida and Michigan should count, both in the interest of fundamental fairness and honoring the spirit of the Democrats' 50-state strategy." As Ezra Klein notes: "It's almost as if they thought putting it after... the word 'FACT,' would be like a Jedi mind trick."

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If she underestimated her Democratic opponent Obama this badly this doesn't bode well for how she will react to international and domestic contingencies and emergencies. Pathetic!

It is Clinton who uses words to deny reality, and expects them to magically change it. Haven't we had enough of that over the last seven years?

[ 25 February 2008: Message edited by: mary123 ]

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It is now apparent that the Clinton campaign had seriously miscalulated their financial position in the critical first months of caucuses and primaries:

She simply did not have the cash to compete in the post-Feb. 5 states, mostly because her campaign spending blueprint was built around two flawed premises: that no one would be able to match her fundraising and that the nomination would be decided on Super Tuesday.

The seeds of this dilemma, however, were planted through the fundraising strategy she had adopted in the previous year, by the fourth quarter of 2007 a stunning 47% of Obama's fundraising was coming from individual donors contributing $200 dollars or less while the majority of Hillary's loyal donors were 'maxed out:'

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Wow. Not only has Obama's strategy paid off but it positions him favourably for the general election. Hillary, on the other hand, already feeling the effects of bad financial management, is now facing not only a cash shortage as critical expensive races loom but potentially the narrative that this predicament erodes her core message of being a capable and experienced executive manager.

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[ 25 February 2008: Message edited by: mary123 ]

Plus McCain and his wife both have enough skeletons in their closet that both come out looking very slimy if and when the those truths comes out.

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What strikes me is the way Clinton's campaign decisions are being berated for being BOTH astute and misguided. I keep hearing the "She's such a witch" and "She's such a klutz" smear attempts from the same people, often in the same breath. Isn't this the kind of double binds that are always used against women...

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If you were only repetitive [ie, your attribution of all criticism of HC to her gender] I'd let it go by.

But in getting there, you're also just too over the top to let it go by. How about some substantiation of that statement "same people: shes's a [devious] witch / she's a klutz."

And not just digging up some extreme statement by some mindless supporter on Daily Kos.

When McCain made use of Michele Obama's faux pas [something to the effect of 'for the first time I'm proud of my country'], they did nothing about it.

They MIGHT be just holding their fire to let go when they are more prepared. But it may also be- and seems so far- that Obama expects to tough it out by staying on the high road.

Its true that might be the best way to protect the asset he has of how he is seen. But if that is and remains the strategy, it's not without risk.

He did deal with the little Swift Boating touches he got from the Clinton campaign. But that was also because it was easy enough to do on a strictly factual basis. Being able to effectively respond to Swift Boating by pointing to the facts is the exception, not the norm.

The one exception is that Obama did not respond directly to the mass mailing attack on his abortion rights voting record- instead using the fact Clinton would do it against her and her campaign.

That is an example of dealing effectively with an attack where refuting the facts is mostly going to throw gas on the flames. But I think that's the exception that proves the rule: so far, Obama has only dealt with attacks where he is on safe and personally comfortable ground doing it. [Parrying off Bill Cinton's South Carolina yapping dog routine being another case.]

The attack on Michele Obama is more like what will be coming. It didn't sink in much because the McCain Obama competition is not the main event now.

But even if the hits on Obama are all like that- not as damaging as the Swift Boating of Kerry- the cumulative effect of a number of them can be substantial.

Bill O'Reilly has apologized to Michelle Obama for his lynching remark.

The blogosphere is helping Obama fight the good fight - he has so many passionate bloggers.

Here's one response to the Michelle Obama debacle.

Moreover, as much as I hate to get into the "is Obama black" question, I would say that he isn't to a large number of voters. Incidentally it is on that front that Michelle Obama (whose thesis is certainly relevant on that front) is much more of a liability (in that there are probably a larger number of people that react negatively to her than most presidential spouses).

The likely Republican strategy will be to nail down Obama's stance on the issues. Obama has been very adept at seeming simultaneously centrist and leftist. He will make speeches in which he'll say stuff like "I will look at vouchers as a policy option", and then vote dead-set against them. On an issues election, McCain will have an advantage because he is much closer to the political center.

Moreover, on the one issue where he is decidedly not in the center (Iraq), his war record and support for the surge work in his favor. The question on Iraq is how you end up framing it.

If the question is "should America have gone to war?" then Obama and the earlier withdrawal stance wins. If the question is "given that America is already there, should they finish the job" McCain has a much stronger hand (since a civil war, rise in Iranian influence and big trouble for the Kurds are the probably consequence of withdrawal, whether the initial invasion was a good idea or not).

As tempting as it is to focus the election on Iraq, tying McCain to Bush, it is probably a losing strategy - especially when McCain is weak on the economy. McCain has a record as a fighter against pork-barrel spending, but that is not a real economic strategy - it doesn't get close to getting at the budget deficit.

The second prong of attack will be attacking Obama's experience. True, it didn't work in the primaries, but there are reasons for that. Obama is very popular among young people, who predominantly vote Democrat and, this time around, were disproportionately represented in the primaries (especially caucus states). Young people are not likely to vote on experience.

It can be as simple as juxtoposing particular kinds of images of Obama- black man haranguing rather than black man cooing and soothing- with one of the many issues in the US that touches on race.

Bill Clinton was actually doing a form of this in South Carolina. But the juxtaposed image Bill was trying to do was very complex, and prone to not work. Bill was doing one with black people as the target audience as well as whites.

The Republicans don't have to get into those complications. Offending black people has few practical risks for them since they lose only a handful of voters they haven't lost anyway. They just have to make sure the message is not too overt to offend other swing voters... that protests will look lame and whiny to the majority.

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Originally posted by mary123:
The blogosphere is helping Obama fight the good fight - he has so many passionate bloggers.

Here's one response to the Michelle Obama debacle.

Sorry Cindy McCain, It's Time to Take the Gloves Off

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Wow, fighting what good fight? The fight for the right to be as big a misogynist as the Republicans? Look at the obnoxious shit in that blog posting:

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McCain's trophy wife

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just another GOP Stepford Wife as vacant as the previous ones

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anorexic-looking Cindy McCain

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her bleached blond hair and her shiny new face-lift

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Cindy who is 18 years younger than Gramps McCain

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Cindy's sordid past as a suburban trophy wife junkie

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