Obama Mocks Clinton Mocking Obama

Last Sunday, Hillary Clinton "stood in the rec center at Rhode Island College and mocked fellow presidential candidate Barack Obama for his campaign's theme of hope, saying Obama can't just 'wave a magic wand and have the special interests disappear.'" [Watch video of Clinton here.] On Saturday, Obama took the same stage and couldn't resist bringing up her comments. CNN describes the scene:

"I think she was here, right?" Obama said toward the end of his stump speech. "She was saying 'Oh, you know, he thinks that the clouds will part and... [that] he's so naïve.'"

The room quickly erupted in "boos."

"Wait, wait, wait," he said.

"He thinks he can wave a magic wand," he continued, mocking Clinton's impression, "and suddenly everything will be great."

Obama then went in to his standard stump lines, saying it's true he "talks about hope a lot." He then defended his rationale in doing so.

Watch it:

Obama mocks Clinton for mocking him earlier about his message of hope. http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid1439819445http://www.brightcove.com/channel.jsp?channel=1178199204

Comments

[BUSHsurvivor]

Wait a minute! Who is sleeping on the job here? Where is HuffBO's huge 10 page spread on HIP HOP's Russell Simmons endorsing Barack?

[tkk]

Can't this guy come up with anything original? He's already copied her whole platform!

[Redmom]

If it is OK for the gander, it is OK for the goose.

He does not get mad, he gets humorous.

Too bad it is a trait that Hillary does not have in her character.

Saturday Night Live has not been good for years...not when you compare it
to the old days. Someone should have told Hillary that...

[johnnycanuck]

He's real .

[Superbus]

Why should she quit ? Obama has not gotten the prerequisite number of delegates yet and she should honor her supporters and play this out until there is a real winner due to vote count, not surrender.

[Siddhartha]

Barack should not stoop to Hillary's level. It is beneath him. He should strive to maintain the cool discipline that is his hallmark.

[InternationalObserver]

Yup, it's pretty hard to argue with a person who offers you Hope. I was surprised that Hillary mocked him on that one. Is having Hope a bad thing?

[JackSlappyNotYourPappy]

.

"Obama Mocks Clinton Mocking Obama"

Mocks, mocking ... what no mocked?

Thanks a locked!

.

[galateadoro]

He didn't mock Clinton, he just mentioned her mocking him. Jeez.

[kevin4obama]

No comments? Nah? Thats what it says now, guess its a bug or something

[BluGrrl]

So tomorrow will Clinton mock Obama mocking Clinton mocking Obama?

[SeekerOne]

Based upon this latest Gallup poll, Hillary's "kitchen sink" strategy isn't paying off:

http://www.gallup.com/poll/104716/Gallup-Daily-Tracking-Election-2008.aspx

[SlithyTove]

Children, children...don't make daddy stop the car, now.

[Maifmart]

Unfortunately for the first lady of the first black president, her opponent is a charismatic black man who inspires all Americans and raises tons of money from grass roots Americans through the internet. This unexpected development has limited her usual Democratic support to the Illegal aliens and older Latinos normally pitted against Afro-Americans in our underclass, uneducated blue collar workers, old women from the ERA failure, and Democratic insiders the Clinton’s have dirt on. Paid for with special interest money she denies allegiance to.

It’s time for her to give it up, spend some of that money Bill’s raking in, retire, write a book, get a gigolo, whatever; our country is not ready for another Clinton administration.

[CitizenK]

Obama: The Unacceptable Choice

For you were once darkness, but now you are light….Live as children of light — for the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true.
-- Ephesians 5:8-9


Until quite recently, before I went the Web site of the so-called church that Mr. Obama attends, I had thought that the contradictions of his campaign, career, and character required finely honed and nuanced political argument. I was very mistaken. On reading the statement of beliefs of the Trinity United Church of Christ http://www.tucc.org/black_value_system.htmll], I was appalled to discover the dark language of ethnocentric bigotry, class prejudice, and paranoid racial stereotyping. This shameful, toxic brew can simply be called what it in fact is: racism. And because of their attendance at and support for this organization, Mr. Obama and his wife, and the campaign they have run, can simply be called what it has been: racist.

--This is why as far back as his vaunted “good judgment” speech of October 2002 in opposition to war in Iraq, then State Senator Obama singled out two Jewish neo-conservatives by name -- Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz -- as those parties who wanted “to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats,” which in language and assignment of blame echo the views of Louis Farrakhan. [1]

And it is why the names of the real architects and propagandists for the war: his relative, Vice President Dick Cheney; Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld; then National Security Advisor Condolezza Rice; or Secretary of State Colin Powell, are conspicuously absent from Obama’s speech.

--This is why Minister Farrakhan supports Obama, and why the church, in its turn, recently awarded one of its highest honors on Farrakhan.

--This explains why Mr. Obama found Senator Clinton only “Likable enough” and why he resorted to the tangled knot of racial stereotyping when he replied that he would have to see Bill dance before he could decide if he was a brother in answer to a debate question about Mr. Clinton’s unofficial honorific as the “first black president.”

--This why Mrs. Obama, for her part, could not even say the name of Hillary during one interview and why she refused to say that she would support Clinton as nominee, a mere formality of party etiquette. And it is why it was not a matter of a lack of patriotism, as the McCains suggested, when she said she could finally feel proud of her country after her husband’s success in the Wisconsin primary, but a matter of racism.

--This is why the Obama campaign was content to have its co-chair Jesse Jackson, Jr. throw a racially tinged light on the so-called crying jag in New Hampshire because the senator was not crying about the black tragedy of New Orleans, as if she were some Marie Antoinette of the Old South. And it is why Obama campaign representative, New York State Senator Bill Perkins used quite explicit racial stereotyping in a speech aimed at discouraging his constituents from voting for Clinton by saying, Harlem "is not Bill Clinton's backyard or his plantation. Underscore, plantation.” [2]

--It is the reason for the willfully malicious spin put on President Clinton’s lucid debunking of Obama’s claim to superior judgment about the war that he gave at Dartmouth and for the intentionally slanderous misinterpretation of Senator Clinton’s central argument on the importance of experienced leadership when she alluded to the role of President Johnson in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

--And that is why anyone who does not support Obama looks the same to his campaign, with individuals as different as Ohio Governor Ted Strickland and Black Entertainment Television billionaire Robert Johnson having been targeted with the same ugly racist smear attacks.

--In short, this is why both of Mr. and Mrs. Obama were so ready, willing, and able to use the "nuclear option," to launch a preemptive first strike against both Clintons and to attack them as racists despite the facts, despite the costs to the reputation of the only Democrat who has managed to win two terms in the Oval Office since Franklin Roosevelt, despite the costs to the party, and despite the profound contradiction it represented for someone who has been selling himself as the candidate of unity and reconciliation.


To paraphrase the simple wisdom of Forest Gump, “Racism is as racism does.” It reveals itself in the pattern of what is done and said, in what and whom is honored. The hate speech of Republican George Allen quickly and quite rightly ended his presidential aspirations and the association of Republican Trent Lott with Strom Thurmond quickly and quite rightly ended his career as Senate Majority Leader because in today‘s America no one can or should call themselves a national leader who cannot reject the divisive scandal of racism as a tool of political policy or practice or of personal belief.

The question before the voters in Texas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania is whether Democrats can hold their would-be leaders to the same standard as even Republicans have. I pray they will.


[1] Speech before the National Press Club, Washington, DC, May 3, 2004.
[2} Reported on the New Brooklyn Network, Feb. 4, 2008.