<p>“N.B., it was pointed out to me that a certain Monica served at the pleasure of the president. A lot more straightforward, honest, and less damaging to the country if you ask me.”</p>
<p>Was that at or for the pleasure of the president? Whatever… </p>
<p>How would you classify selling presidential pardons? That is pretty straightforward. Is that nore or less damaging to the country than firing political appointees?</p>
<p>"One of the questions about Obama was that he had only been in club fights, never tested in a championship bout. Can he take a punch? I think we are about to find out.</p>
<p>Clinton set him up with a jab on the Geffen dustup, getting him to commit on the record to a rejection of negative campaigning."</p>
<p>I thought she came out much the loser, with Geffen saying out loud to the Californian funding crowd what many of them already thought, and hence providing permission for them to jump ship. Since then, she’s been sliding slowly, and Obama has been gorging on campaign contributions.</p>
<p>It is not clear that, electorally, Hillary can take a punch - she has herself (unlike Obama) never been in a seriously contested election.</p>
<p>“If “The goal is to make the Bushies squirm.” then the goal is strictly political which shows you how interested in bipartisan government the current Democrat leadership is.”</p>
<p>Bipartisan nonsense. Bipartisanship crap would be the worst thing that could happen to the country at this point. </p>
<p>I’m still waiting for the Abramoff shoestore to drop.</p>
<p>Mini:</p>
<p>Having committed himself to no negative campaigning after dressing down his staff following the Geffen dustup, how is Obama going to reconcile the fact that his web consulting firm developed and released a pure attack ad? Either he lied or he has no control over his his own campaign organization. Pick one.</p>
<p>His major campaign theme (the call for a “new” kind of politics) just became hollow rhetoric. He can’t even say it with a straight face.</p>
<p>BTW, I’m not sure that your analysis of the fundraising lanscape is accurate. Obama has been successfully raising money; however, Clinton has been mining huge swaths of the Democratic party apparatus. In the last week, she raised $2.6 million at a Washington fundraiser and a similar amount at a NY fundraiser. She also got the support of the largest fundraiser group in New Jersey…a group that was in the top three for fundraising for the Kerry campaign. All of the candidates had accepted the invitation of this group to make presentations. Biden hosted them in his home. Obama’s campaign never responded to their invitation. He finally called them back after they had decided to work for Clinton.</p>
<p>We’ll see. The first quarter fundraising reports come out at the end of March.</p>
<p>“Having committed himself to no negative campaigning after dressing down his staff following the Geffen dustup, how is Obama going to reconcile the fact that his web consulting firm developed and released a pure attack ad? Either he lied or he has no control over his his own campaign organization. Pick one.”</p>
<p>Won’t have to. Remember “Swift Boat Vets for Truth”? She comes out the loser again. </p>
<p>No one doubts her ability to raise funds; that’s no surprise. What is a surprise is Obama’s ability to raise his, and the willingness of former Clintonians to publicly jump ship.</p>
<p>“the President has the legal authority to fire them for any reason he likes”</p>
<p>Except to block an investigation. Which is suspicious at this point.</p>
<p>Furthermore, even assuming that nothing illegal happened, and that no one perjured himself in the earlier testimony, this is a horrible policy precedent. There’s been a strong tradition of keeping US Attorneys in place throughout a president’s term, absent incompetence or serious misbehavior. That tradition is a great thing because it helps to keep all branches of government more honest (God bless the US Attorney who helped clean up state-level corruption in Illinois). Congress has every right to use the tools at its disposal to try to fight an executive who is making policy decisions it views as disastrous, even if those decisions are legal – it’s not much different from the president vetoing legislation Congress wants. It’s not “personal destruction” to go after someone for doing a terrible job. In other words, there’s a huge difference between “Gonzales is our enemy, and we will bring him down by any means necessary” (personal destruction) and “Gonzales was exercising his power in a way that’s very bad for the country, and we want to hold him accountable and prevent this from happening again” (legitimate political goal).</p>
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</p>
<p>Huh?</p>
<p>You’ve got the facts wrong. It wasn’t Obama’s “web consulting firm” that “developed and released” this video. </p>
<p>Here’s what the guy who made the video has said about it (on a well known blog site):</p>
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</p>
<p>It may well be that Obama can’t “control” what a (now-former) employee of a web consulting firm that he hired - a guy who apparently never even worked on the Obama campaign’s account - does on his own at home on a Sunday afternoon. But that hardly means that either Obama “lied” or he “has no control over his campaign organization.”</p>
<p>Epistrophy:</p>
<p>The head of the Obama campaign’s new media operation is a founding partner of Blue State Media. Blue State Media is a contracted consulting firm to the Obama campaign. An employee of Blue State Media produced and distributed the ad in question.</p>
<p>The Obama campaign did not disavow the ad. Instead they only stated that they were not responsible for it.</p>
<p>You do the math.</p>
<p>Don’t think anyone cares (except Hillary’s campaign).</p>
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</p>
<p>interesteddad:</p>
<p>You must use a different dictionary than I do. </p>
<p>In mine (American Heritage), this is how “disavow” is defined: “To disclaim knowledge of, responsibility for, or association with.”</p>
<p>Correction: The Obama campaign did not disapprove,or certainly did not strenuously disapprove, of the ad.</p>
<p>I should hope not. There will be plenty more. They’re only powerful because they resonate (why, I’m not quite sure - she seems like a perfectly reasonable, well-spoken person to me, for the wife of a mass child murderer.)</p>
<p>Interesteddad:</p>
<p>That’s a significant “correction.”</p>
<p>Why should the Obama campaign be expected to publicly “disapprove” of something that they weren’t responsible for in the first place?</p>
<p>Especially when the Hillary campaign’s “outrage” made folks that much more aware of it. (I never would have heard of it otherwise.)</p>
<p>Two points more for Obama.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>What outrage? The only public comment that the Clinton campaign made was when Clinton was asked about the ad at an appearance earlier this week. She said that she was glad to see anything that got people talking about the election.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Should the Bush campaign have disapproved of the swiftboat ads? Or, the push-polling in South Carolina asking what voters thought of McCain fathering an illegitimate black baby? After all, the campaign claimed to have no connection to those efforts.</p>
<p>It seems to me that, when you build your campaign around “a new kind of politics” and commitments against negative campaigning, you should be expected to disapprove of negative attack ads run on your campaign’s behalf. Especially when they are prepared by the company owned by one of your key campaign managers.</p>
<p>There are differences between the ads in your examples and this one. Among them, this one (which actually isn’t even an “ad” - it’s more akin to a visual op-ed piece) expresses a particular point of view but it contains no lies.</p>
<p>You keep saying that it was “the company” that prepared this video. That might well be significant if it were true. But - as noted above - it isn’t.</p>
<p>epistrophy:</p>
<p>Do you take every politician’s denial at face value? The whole point of a political dirty tricks consultant is to make sure the candidate has “plausible deniability”. I doubt that Blue State Media itemized the billing as “(1) YouTube attack ad”.</p>
<p>Arianna Huffington found out that a Blue State Media employee had done the ad and the name of the employee. The story broke when she called Blue State for a confirmation. Obviously, the Blue State employee had been doing some talking.</p>
<p>Has Obama fired Blue State Media?</p>
<p>Seems odd to me that Mr. No Negative Campaigning is the only candidate in the Democratic race who has suffered a recurring problem of high profile attacks that are, of course, “without the knowledge of the campaign”.</p>
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</p>
<p>No. But neither do I assume that someone - politician or not - is lying in the absence of evidence.</p>
<p>I’d suggest that an advertisement prepared by an employee of the company responsible for Obama’s new media and a company owned by one of Obama’s major consultants is hardly a resounding “absence of evidence”.</p>
<p>IMO, “absence of evidence” would be more convincing (or at least more convenient) if the ad had turned out to be the work of some computer geek at MIT. I mean, what are the odds, of all the web geeks in the United States, that this ad just happened to be done by a web geek at the company owned by a key Obama consultant and hired to do all of Obama’s internet marketing?</p>
<p>Let’s put it this way. Had it been a Republican attack ad, prepared at semi-arms length by an employee of Karl Rove’s company, I think a bit of scepticism about denials would be warranted.</p>
<p>Be that as it may. Now that there is a pattern of “unauthorized” Obama attacks, he becomes a bit more limited in trotting out his “new kind of politics” pitch. Sen. Clinton could just roll her eyes.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Neither did the Republican attack ad showing “white women” in the Harold Ford, Jr. Senate race in Tennessee.</p>
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</p>
<p>This cuts both ways.</p>
<p>As one of Obama’s top strategists put it, if they had set out to pull a dirty trick, “I don’t think we would recruit someone who runs our server.” </p>
<p>Huffington’s take on this seems more to the point: “[T]his episode shows that ‘people are going to be very passionate about this campaign, and they have new tools at their disposal.’”</p>
<p><a href=“http://blogs.suntimes.com/sweet/2007/03/sweet_column_arianna_huffingto.html[/url]”>http://blogs.suntimes.com/sweet/2007/03/sweet_column_arianna_huffingto.html</a></p>