Clinton Team Defends Garin, Says McCain Would Not Be Improvement Over Bush

Clinton campaign communications director Howard Wolfson took to the airwaves on Morning Joe today to defend the halting, unsure performance of newly minted chief strategist Geoff Garin on yesterday's Meet The Press from the ridicule of host Joe Scarborough. Scarborough, by the way, is apparently an aficionado of the latest in beer commercials.

[WATCH.]

SCARBOROUGH: What happened yesterday on Meet The Press? Clinton communication director Howard Wolfson. Dude. Dude. Did you see those dude beer commercials? If I'm you, I'm going, dude? Dude?

BRZEZINSKI: Howard. come on.

SCARBOROUGH: Dude, what happened yesterday?

BRZEZINSKI: You weren't there.

WOLFSON: Geoff, Geoff, Geoff is new to the campaign, he is our...

SCARBOROUGH: Yeah, you can tell.

WOLFSON: No, no. He is our fabulous chief strategist. And it was important for him to go out on Meet The Press for us and I thought he did a great job. David was very feisty. And I think it's in keeping with the kind of campaign that Senator Obama has been running in Pennsylvania these last few days. They have turned very, very negative. So negative in fact that even the press has noticed it and reported it today that the Obama campaign is doing everything it can to spend as much money as it can to spread as much negative information as it can about Senator Clinton here in the closing days in Pennsylvania.

BRZEZINSKI: But as David Axelrod pointed out, the negative ads go both ways. We have been showing them. And I think that's fair. What is he reading there?

SCARBOROUGH: We are still obsessed with Meet The Press. He was reading Cliff Notes on the Clinton campaign.

BRZEZINSKI: Did you write them.

WOLFSON: This is now bordering on the self-referential.

Later, Wolfson reacted strongly to a comment that Obama made over the weekend, that John McCain would, at the very least, be an improvement over President Bush. He pressed the Clinton camp's now-familiar "important state" electability case, suggesting that Tuesday's Pennsylvania result will be a harbinger of success in the general election.

[WATCH.]

WOLFSON: Well, look, we do not agree with Senator Obama that Senator McCain would be an improvement over George Bush in the white house. But he is certainly a formidable figure which is why the Democrats need to nominate the best person we can to go up against him in the fall. And if you look at some of the polling in the swing states like Pennsylvania, like Ohio, like Florida, it is in fact Senator Clinton who matches up much better with Senator Clinton than Senator Obama. And here we have in Pennsylvania another test of this.

Comments

[Farfennugen]

Wasn't Wolfson arrested for meth in Central Park...oh wait that was Richard Quest - I get those two confused all the time.

[drumbunny]

Clinton has campaigned negatively for months on end- and she suddenly has a problem with other people going negative?

Oooooooooh k.

[Newmoney]

Obama's Camp have realized that the super-delegates are threatened by Hillary's resolve to split the party If she does not get the nomination using such tactics as saying she and Mccain have foreign policy experience and all Obama will bring to the table is a speech he made in 2002.

Based on that they decided that he should start courting Mccain too that way Hillary and the superdelegates can start forseeing a move of Obama's supporters to Mccain in the GE.

They hope to present the same threat that Hillary is posing with to the super-delegates.

[Yansher]

The one good thing he said is that he is willing to come aboard the Obama train if Axelrod asked him. But honestly i dont know if I want him to speak for my candidate Sen Obama.

[Yansher]

Yeah that was painful to watch. The guy kept giving excuses that he was new to the campaign. Yet he was out there trying to attack Obama on MTP. Axelrod was a stand up guy and had to cut him some slack yesterday.

[IRIE]

Axelrod is the man

[RThM]

Hillary Clinton has spun around so many issues and non-issues that even her own snaked-toungued surrogates are confused by the babble. Look long. Look hard. This is a Clinton Whitehouse in operation.

[Stillhere29]

Garin performed one nasty belly-flop on Sunday, and Here's Howie Wlofson trying to spin it any way he can. Im clearly not an HRC supporter, but I would be interested in hearing what a Clinton Supporter felt about Garin's appearence.

[stepintothelight]

I would like to see how they defend this???

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXum_-8I1TA

[RThM]

The will blame it on fatigue. Or on press favoritism. Or on Obamaniacs in the studio flashing mirrors into his eyes. On anything except the fact that the people Hillary Clinton chooses to surround heself with might be personally loyal but are actually completely inept. Sound familiar?

[readyfornewleadership]

Exactly!!

[4wehttam]

Yeah I saw Garin on Meet the Press...........it was excruciating to watch. He couldn't defend Hillary's comments about MoveOn.org and using military force against other countries in the Mid East......ugh.

[scorpioleidy]

OMG ... he was AWFUL --- I was embarrassed for him!!!
OBAMA '08

[vincealy]

The selective indignation seeps down too Rendell http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXum_-8I1TA

[iamFrank]

MAYDAY, MAYDAY, the USS HRC has suffered sever damages and is taken on water Fast. "I pray that we see life boats in the water at sunrise Wednesday morning." Will the Captain go down with the ship? Or will it be too late, the waters are chummed and nobody in the Democratic Party survives?
"A half back all full," orders the Captain as the USS McCain slips into another red sunset of Republican delight.

[tristan90us]

metaphor overload!

[LiberTLover]

OK, in addition to what I wrote on another blog about taking some of that $266,000 a month that Hillary pays you Mr. Wolfson, to get her back on her meds, obviously you need to get back on yours as well. As Jon Stewart has so ably pointed out in regard to the lies by the Bush administration, they invented video tape a while back. We are not stupid, we just look that way because the hypocrisy just stuns us with so much of it and so often!!!

[byrok67]

i liked that he seemed almost to genuine to be there. you could tell that he was uncomfortable with having to lie. it was obvious.

[Tane]

Oh come on Wolfson - Hillary camp has repeatedly praised McCain and even ran ads claiming that McCain is more electable than Obama! Talk about hypocrisy!

[DMHendrix]

OK, the guy had a bad outing on MTP...but here is the bright spot in this otherwise dull moment in time...Thank GOD none of us had to listen to Mark Penn or Howard Wolfson. Those two make me grab the Maalox bottle.

[kellygrrrl]

The Clinton Campaign seems to spend a lot of time just trying to cover each other's a$$

[DreamConjuror]

Well the Politicheskoye Buro is alive and strong in the Clinton machine.

Thanks for the videos

[260Parkway]

I actually saw him on Meet the Press Sunday and I thought he would have been fired this morning. He didn't know where Sen. Clinton stood on her statement in the debt about taking on other countries. It was just an awful performance. Practice, Practice, Practice along with briefing him on the Senators stance on subjects.

[Yansher]

He job is to do damage control after Penn stepped down. Poor guy, he didnt even know which ads the Clinton campaign is running in PA.

[sheisme]

Take note of the people Hillary surrounds herself with compared to Obama. Now ... who do you want picking a cabinet or supreme court justices?

[argent1]

Ayers for Supreme court, Wright for Secretary of State. Rezko, Treasurer. Rashid Khalidi, Secretary of Defense, Exelon -- Secretaries of Energy.

[mntnguy]

it is funny how the Clinton campaign will through names around when both Clinton's in fact have attended that church in Chicago, of course it was when they need to get some of the black vote in the area! Rev Wright also visited the Clinton white house and had meeting with Bill Clinton. As to the other give me a break If anyone was held responsible for the actions of other that them may or may not have been at a large party with. No one in Washington would be clean. Judgement is what we need in our next president and thought this campaign the only one that has stood out to me was Obama. Clinton's campaign is just a mess. Mc Cain can not get his story or facts straight from one moment to the next

[RThM]

Wow. You must really think most Americans are stupid. But I suppose you wear a flag pin so no one will question your own lack of intelligence.