On a conference call, top strategist Mark Penn just told reporters that in the next two weeks Hillary Clinton will go after Barack Obama on the issue of who is better qualified to be commander-in-chief — and Penn suggested that Clinton would be a better commander of the nation’s armed forces than both Obama and John McCain. “She is the only person in this race who is both ready to be commander-in-chief and would end the Iraq war and start to bring troops home within 60 days, compared to both Sen. Obama and Sen. McCain,” Penn told reporters.
Later, Penn made it clear that Clinton will push the commander-in-chief issue in coming days. “The Republican nominee has extensive credibility in this area, and the Democrat is going to need to be commander-in-chief,” Penn said. Obama has “relatively no experience in national security,” Penn continued, an issue that “is going to be reflected in the debates that we have over the next couple of weeks.”
Let the finger pointing begin!
Frankly, I think it’s too late for Hillary to try this approach. It might have worked several weeks ago, when there was no clear GOP nominee, and Obama’s wave of momentum hadn’t quite yet caught hold. Now, however, she’s in a double-bind: She’s clearly not in the same league as John McCain when it comes to national security, and any barbs she slings in Obama’s direction in this regard will only be recycled by McCain against him in the general election, where Obama is already in a seriously weak position where this issue is concerned. So, the likely result of this strategy is going to be a netroots / lefty backlash against Hillary for using “Republican talking points” to attack Obama, more than anything else.
Update: More from Byron:
UPDATE: Later in the call, the Clinton team was asked whether the not-qualified-to-be-commander-in-chief criticism of Obama was going too far, given that it would be used by Republicans against Obama if Obama is the Democratic nominee against John McCain. “We don’t believe that he is the one who will face John McCain,” Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson said. “This is a legitimate question that Sen. Obama would face if he were the nominee, and it is a question that he is facing as a result of criticism from Sen. McCain now, so I think it’s perfectly appropriate.”
Heh.
Filed under: Barack Obama, Democrats, Election 2008, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, News, Politics
She’ll throw every dirty trick in the book at Obama over the next couple of months but she still won’t be the Democratic nominee. What she will do, however, is help McCain win in November because she’ll have taken Obama down with her.
Dammit brogarn, you just boiled my whole post down to two sentences. Sheesh, you’re making me feel Greenwaldian here :-)
I’m succinct like that. It’s how I roll.
But, if it makes you feel any better, my unwashed, uneducated self has no clue what or whom you’re referencing by the term “Greenwaldian”.
Glenn Greenwald, famously verbose lefty blogger and suspected sockpuppet master.
I envy you that you’ve never heard of him.
Ah! I’ve seen the occasional reference. Thanks for filling me in.
This will be fun to watch, because as they each try and prove that they are the better CIC–and more importantly, try and disprove each other–McCain can sit back and laugh as they do all the work for him.
God, I love politics.