Word: clinton
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...such crucial matters as Senator Obama's comments about rural bitterness, his former pastor, an obscure sixties radical with whom he was allegedly "friendly," and the burning constitutional question of why he doesn't wear an American flag pin on his lapel - with a single detour into Senator Hillary Clinton's yarn about sniper fire in Tuzla. Apparently, Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos ran out of time before they could ask Obama why he's such a lousy bowler...
...must be said that Obama did not seem very comfortable on the defensive, and he had trouble answering questions like whether he's more patriotic than the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Since "performance" is all that the talking heads ever notice, they'll probably declare Clinton the winner of the debate. She constantly salted Obama's wounds, all the while insisting that she was merely concerned that Republicans would salt them in the fall, and that his various controversies simply "raised questions" about his electability; at one point she claimed that his exhaustively chewed-over relationship with Wright "deserves further exploration...
...Last night's debate did not reveal any big policy differences between Obama and Clinton. But it did reveal their different approaches to politics, and the different arguments for their candidacies that stem from those approaches...
...Clinton's main argument was that she can beat John McCain because she's already been vetted in this culture, "having gone through 16 years on the receiving end of what the Republican Party dishes out." She's basically saying that her dirty laundry - the questionable money she made in cattle futures, the Travelgate firings, her kiss of Suha Arafat, her husband's pardons, the unpleasantries of 1998 - is no longer newsworthy, and the mere fact of her political survival shows that it's irrelevant. "I have a lot of baggage, and everyone has rummaged through it for many years...
...Obama's argument is that he can rise above the divisive politics of the '90s - not just the intense partisanship, but the constant posturing and point-scoring in the service of winning a news cycle. He portrays Clinton as a victim of those war-room politics - but also a veteran practitioner. "Senator Clinton learned the wrong lesson, because she's adopted the same tactics," he said last night. He's talking about the culture of perpetual spin, where everything is fair game in the service, including your opponent's kindergarten dreams of grandeur. It's a game of guilt...