To that end, I came across this article by Dan Balz in today's Washington Post entitled "Obama Criticizes Clinton's Drive to Win". When I saw the headline, red flags went up all over the place. When I read the lede, however, I realized that Obama had gone and done something really stupid - he was reading from Newt Gingrich's playbook.
Sen. Barack Obama leveled a fresh round of criticism at Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton yesterday, accusing his rival for the Democratic nomination of following a campaign plan that prizes calculation over candor and that is aimed more at winning the election than uniting the country.
--snip--
Obama, who represents Illinois, described Clinton as a skilled politician running a textbook campaign but said the textbook itself is badly flawed and skewed against ordinary Americans. "It's a textbook that's all about winning elections but says nothing about how to bring the country together to solve problems," he said.
Obama pointed to last week's debate in Philadelphia, in which he, former senator John Edwards of North Carolina and Sen. Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut all challenged Clinton for being equivocal or engaging in political doubletalk, as emblematic of Clinton's strategy.
"As we saw in the debate last week, it encourages vague, calculated answers to suit the politics of the moment, instead of clear, consistent principles about how you would lead America," he said. "It teaches you that you can promise progress for everyday people while striking a bargain with the very special interests who crowd them out."
I don't know who Obama's advisors are, but on this particular topic, I think his advisors are more than stupid. Consider the issue logically. Obama is criticizing Sen. Clinton, essentially, for being ambitious. For wanting to win the nomination. Yet, he is doing so in order to win the nomination. The substance of his criticism is that she is a calculating, traditional politician who has neither the vision nor the strategy to attempt something bold and visionary for the country. He is doing so by engaging in negative campaigning, one of the oldest, most tried and true, but certainly effective campaign tactics around, which seeks to divide the electorate from a candidate.
Now, other than the latter part of Obama's criticism (in essence that she is George Bush redux, a divider not a uniter) the bulk of it could be construed as sexist by anyone who might think along those lines - people like Sen. Clinton, for example. After all, criticizing a woman for being ambitious, for being careful and calculating in pursuing her ambition - we don't criticize Barack Obama for being ambitious, or for being careful and calculating in pursuing his ambition, do we? That would be silly.
Yet, it seems not at all odd to level these criticisms as Sen. Clinton, criticisms which essentially say, "Stop acting like a politician."
I do wish that someone, somewhere, would tell these people to stop using Newt Gingrich's old playbook from 1994.
