Operation Chaos’s Most Effective
Operative
In the case of politics, being on the same page with someone doesn’t necessarily mean you are on the same team with them. Jimmy Hoffa is ideologically in line with Democrats but it was probably unlikely that he would have accepted a lapdance from Robert Kennedy. With this in mind, in what reality does Barack Obama think he can trust Hillary Clinton?
For now, Hillary is playing nice, and saying all the right things but Barack would have to be as naïve as Mrs. Clinton accused him of being during the campaign for him to think she is on his side. At this point, her behavior has a financial motivation; she is looking to Barack as a means of paying off the millions in campaign debt she has incurred. Theoretically Obama gets her help on the campaign trail and an avenue back to the Clinton supporters he alienated during the primary battle. Had Barack ever seen the film "Monster" he would know what happens when somebody pays to play slap and tickle with an aggressive enemy who will trade favors for cash.
First of all let’s take a look at the reality of the situation from the Clinton point of view. If Barack wins the presidency he would be the Democrat's automatic nominee in during the 2012 presidential election. The next time Hillary will have the opportunity to run for the office that she sees as her birthright, she will be 69. Considering the genial lifestyle of her husband, 69 may be considered a good omen by him, but realistically, by that time new faces will have emerged and Hillary will have an even tougher time then she did during this year’s primary. Her only hope for a successful presidential run is for Barack to lose this year. If Obama falls on his face, Hillary can either steal the nomination between now and the convention, or run an "I told you so" campaign in 2012. For either of these things to happen Barack has to be cut off at the knees. Fortunately for Mrs. Clinton it seems that some of her surrogates are hiding hack saws under their jackets while pretending to genuflect at the feet of the Messianic Hussein Obama.
Somebody in the Obama campaign should have started to get the strong odor of a rat when General Wesley Clark went out in front of the world and started to attack John McCain’s military service.
Clark, speaking on behalf of the Obama campaign, stated that “riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is not a qualification to be president." He went on to dismiss McCain’s leadership of a fighter squadron as command experience and said that the Arizona senator was "untested and untried."
There are a ton of places to attack John McCain, but his military experience is not one of them. Clark, as one of Barack’s advisors and the military face of the Obama campaign, made a boneheaded tactical error by trying to make an issue of McCain’s military service. Choosing to go after McCain on this topic is like trying to subdue a Smilodon by grasping it by the canines and pulling really hard.
Wesley Clark’s words in effect become a commercial for John McCain’s service to our country. What is more curious is the fact that while the good general highlighted McCain’s strongest points, he managed to make Obama’s most vulnerable issues a part of the national conversation.
First of all, he called John McCain “untested and untried”. While there are probably a dozen former North Vietnamese torture room employees who would have a different opinion about how “untested and untried” the Arizona Senator is, it brings Obama’s own thin resume into the fore. This is a guy who wants to be President and he has not ever served a full term as a United States Senator. He lacks any military experience and besides getting an “incomplete” for his time in office, his biggest claim to fame is being a “community organizer”. It doesn’t get much more “untested and untried” then that.
Even worse, in his attempts to clarify his previous statements, General Clark dismissed military service of any kind as something valuable to the presidency and instead stated that “I think being president is about having good judgment.”
Once again he has shed a light on the voter’s biggest concerns over Obama; specifically his inexplicable association with the openly racist Reverend Wright, the anti-Caucasian Father Pfleger, the unapologetic domestic terrorist William Ayers, and those pesky Black Panther ties that keep popping up.
While Wesley Clark is doing his best to remind us of John McCain’s unwavering service to the nation, while bringing the topic back to Barak’s weaknesses, the President who made him the general he is, seems to be doing his best to cut Obama’s Achilles tendon as well.
At the Aspen Ideas Festival Bill Clinton hinted that former prisoners of war may be unstable. At this event he said “Every living soul on this planet has some highly-justified anger. Everyone. If you know anybody who was a P.O.W. for any time, they can be going on for years and all of a sudden something will happen that will trigger all those bad memories.”
This statement will not win Barack any new voters, but suggesting that a veteran with McCain’s P.O.W. background is unstable is insulting enough to drive some people away.
So were these independent acts of stupidity? On the surface, Wesley Clark can claim the Waco slaughter as his biggest success as the commander of a military ground force. This does not speak well of his intelligence. He has always been a loyal and unwavering Clinton loyalist though. What is bad for Hillary is bad for him. An Obama presidency could be seen as very bad for Mrs. Clinton, if looked at through the prism of her personal aspiration.
While one can question the political savvy of Wesley Clark, Bill Clinton can not be painted as a political novice under any circumstances. At the same time when the Obama campaign is talking about the importance of having the Clintons onboard, and the value of Bill Clinton specifically; President Clinton goes out and makes a statement guaranteed to have some blowback on the Obama campaign.
We will probably not know for sure if Clinton loyalists are secretly using the Obama campaign as their own personal piñata for a very long time. This is the sort of thing that usually comes out decades after the actual event. With that said, objective evidence suggests that there is some undercutting of the Obama campaign by those with longstanding relationships to Hillary Clinton. Whether or not this is by design is up for debate, but the fact that he would now be counting on a bitter rival (one who invented the politics of personal destruction) to help him win the White House adds another question mark to the judgment issue. Most people who know what the Clinton’s are about, and are aware that they are on the wrong end of Bill and Hillary’s wrath would probably prefer a sea urchin colonic to having these people ‘help” in a campaign. |
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| Brian Cherry is an Associate Editor for The New Media Journal. He was born, raised and lives in the state of MI and from his home in the far north pursues the two passions that have driven him since his high school days, writing and the study of Scandinavian history... |
