Clinton Will Keep the Heat on Obama
By Alan Stewart Carl | Related entries in 2008 Election, DemocratsNow that Hillary Clinton has won the popular vote in Texas and Ohio, she has every reason to stay in the race. And every reason to keep the heat on Barack Obama. After all, going negative worked.
A lot of people have criticized Clinton for the now famous “3 a.m.” ad but it was a brilliant piece of messaging. For the last few months, she’s said over and over that her experience should trump Obama’s charisma. The voters didn’t seem to be getting the point. So she hit them over the head with it. The heavy handed approach played on people’s fears but it finally communicated what all the “ready on day one” talk never did. It’s not just that she’s more capable of passing a healthcare plan, it’s that she’s not a novice who might make a fatal mistake in a crisis.
Obama, of course, helped Clinton out enormously with his very novice-like NAFTA snafu. It made him look unaware of the complexities in dealing with foreign nations. Now, Clinton will attack him for anything he does that makes him or his advisors seem inexperienced. And the press, which is slowly emerging from the fogged windows of Obama love, is likely to give plenty of coverage to the Clinton version of the stories.
Whether or not you think the negative tactics are appropriate, they clearly work. Obama now has a choice, either shred his carefully crafted image as a post-partisan and go negative himself or figure out an extremely smart parry. Oh, and it would help if he didn’t tell any more foreign governments one thing while telling the voters another.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 5th, 2008 and is filed under 2008 Election, Democrats. 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.
March 5th, 2008 at 11:29 am
Alan,
I agree that the 3 AM ad was an effective ad. I just don’t get why it is considered “negative”. It must be me, because this notion seems to be the conventional wisdom.
I thought it was good because It focused attention on the unknowns of an Obama presidency. It reinforced the point that a Clinton presidency is familiar, and an Obama presidency is a cipher - fundamentally unknowable. I just do not see that as negative. It is factual. As I said in another comment here - a Clinton presidency is a known quantity, and an Obama presidency is a crapshoot. You can’t learn enough to overcome that fact, you can only learn enough to ignore it.
Speaking only for myself, I would feel a lot more comfortable with an Obama presidency after four or eight years of seasoning as vice-president in a Clinton administration.
March 5th, 2008 at 12:15 pm
mw,
I don’t really see it as “negative” either. I didn’t describe it as such in the post but it was adjacent to the “going negative” link so that’s my fault for not being clear. The ad was heavy handed and played on people’s fears (which is never the most noble of tactics) but I didn’t find it negative in what is normally meant by negative advertising.
March 6th, 2008 at 6:24 am
I must say Jack - Great effing letter.