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Campaign Gets Negative And Nasty In Wisconsin
It is getting a bit nasty in Wisconsin. As both candidates prep for Tuesday's upcoming primary, Sen. Hillary Clinton has launched another critical television ad attacking Sen. Barack Obama for an ad of his own and challenging him to more debates.
It's a classic campaign maneuver often reserved (as in this case) for the candidate who is trailing in the polls. But Clinton's charge has been effective enough for the Obama camp to feel the need to hit back.
On a late Friday afternoon conference call, Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle reminded reporters that, far from shying away from voters, Obama was actually campaigning in the state while Clinton was not.
"Now to have Senator Clinton launch these false and negative ads, somehow criticizing him for not being straight about people in Wisconsin, is more of the politics he is trying to do away with. The fact is Sen. Clinton has not been in Wisconsin yet," said Doyle, an Obama supporter. "The hypocrisy of somehow claiming that sending a husband and a daughter is somehow equal to having the candidate himself or herself come. Sen. Obama came to Wisconsin on the very first night of our week long primary."
Obama himself responded to he ad earlier in the day, suggesting that the usefulness of debates in general has diminished:
"The debate exercise is one that I think has become fairly predictable. I could make the arguments on behalf of Senator Clinton that she would make against me in a debate. We all know them. You guys could too. And I'm sure the same applies to the other side. On the other hand, when we have a chance to talk to voters directly, when we have a chance to give them a sense of where we want to take the country and that's my priority in these closing weeks."
The back and forth between the two camps over whether or not to debate underscores just how critical every remaining state on the primary calendar has become. With Obama expanding on his pledge delegate lead following victories in this past Tuesday's Potomac primary, and as more super-delegates have taken their support to his campaign, Clinton has sought to fight him for every remaining inch of political real estate. The campaign, this week, announced a new round of office openings in all upcoming primary states, including Puerto Rico.
In addition to Wisconsin, Texas and Ohio are the two major upcoming battlegrounds. And in the Lone Star state on Friday, former President Bill Clinton reemerged as an attack-dog, saying that while Obama "excites" voters, his health care plan "would in fact deny us universal health-care coverage." The Obama campaign responded by calling the line a "false accusation", the kind "that failed his wife's campaign in South Carolina."
Meanwhile, in Ohio, the Obama camp was doing some attacking of its own, taking Clinton to task with a controversial mailer that claimed she previously supported the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). That campaign literature has since been called into question for after a line it used from a Newsday article - suggesting Clinton believes NAFTA was a "boon" for the economy -- was acknowledged by the paper to be an "unclear" and misleading description of her position. Moreover, several former Clinton officials and biographers have since described her as a quiet skeptic of the legislation.
Ohio Lt. Gov. Lee Fisher, a Clinton supporter, lamented on Friday "that Obama chose to introduce himself to state voters in such a way. Sloan said the mailer 'really reached over the bounds,' and was just short of 'mail fraud.'" But the Obama camp stuck by the piece.
"Sen. Clinton talks so much about wanting to debate. I can see why, I think she's having a vigorous debate with herself on NAFTA," the campaign's press secretary Bill Burton told reporters. "It is a fact that Hillary Clinton supported NAFTA, touted NAFTA and is now trying to run away from that for her own reason."
Voters in Wisconsin (and Hawaii) will set the process back in motion on Tuesday when they hit the polls. Victories there would make ten states in a row for Obama and could, observers note, portend a close race in Ohio.
"Wisconsin is a little bit of a tell for Ohio," Ken Goldstein, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told the Wall Street Journal. "Either the Clinton campaign has done a brilliant job of managing expectations, or they're missing an opportunity here and they're in real trouble."
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February 15, 2008 05:37 PM