Give Clinton The Benefit Of The Doubt For Obama Muslim Smear?
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in 2008 Election, Barack, HillaryThey have a history with this, but the campaign has said they don’t think their staff had anything to do with it this time.
So should they be given a pass?
Drudge reported this morning that Clinton staffers had “circulated” the photo. He didn’t say who circulated it, what level of Clinton staffer had circulated it, or to whom it had been circulated. Drudge is the sole source for this email’s existence. Nonetheless, the media has been all over the story today.Asked if the campaign had any role, Wolfson said, “No, not to my knowledge…I’ve never seen that picture before. I’m not aware that anyone else here has. I’m not aware that anyone here has circulated this e-mail.”
Wolfson did say, however, that the campaign agreed with part of the message in the email — that if the same photo had appeared of Hillary, it would have been a big story: “It is a common view among this campaign and our supporters that there is a difference in how the media covers our campaign and how it covers Senator Obama.”
TPM says that’s says Wolfson “strongly” denied this, but it doesn’t read that way to me. Maybe they’re still grilling their staff about it and seeing if anybody will fess up?
However, I find it odd that Wolfson would take this opportunity to try and push the idea that the media is treating their campaign unfairly when its Obama who has been smeared today. Curious, no?
More as it develops…
This entry was posted on Monday, February 25th, 2008 and is filed under 2008 Election, Barack, Hillary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
February 25th, 2008 at 5:15 pm
Ok. Lets think a little more about which camp was actually damaged by a smear today.
Let’s posit that there are two smears in evidence here.
SMEAR #1
An attempt to smear of the Obama campaign by publishing a picture of Obama in a funny hat, presumably to reinforce the widely distributed but thoroughly discredited and debunked “Obama is a muslim” e-mail.
SMEAR #2
An attempt to smear the slimy sleazy Clinton campaign as deliberately promoting the debunked “Obama is a Muslim” meme in a desperate last ditch attempt to swing the Texas and Ohio primary though typical Clintonian underhanded tactics.
Which smear is more likely? Which smear is more believable? Which smear is more effective? Which smear might actually change votes?
I submit, that smear #1 is transparently stupid if it was trying to reinforce a completely debunked meme to Democratic voters who don’t believe it, and would change exactly ZERO votes.
On the other hand, there are a large group of people who would tend to believe Smear #2, thinking that it reinforces the worst of what people suspect about the Clinton campaign, and some hearing it might even be duped into repeating the smear promoted by a campaign flack verbatim on their blogs. That widely propogated smear could potentially could do real damage to the Clinton campaign.
Now that smear, unlike #1 would be a truly effective smear since it could potentially change many votes.