11-08-2008, 03:52 PM
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#1560 (permalink)
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Last Online: 09-05-2009 09:11 PM Join Date: Apr 2008 Location: At home
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| More fodder provided by the Clinton camp: Adviser told Hillary Clinton to attack Barack Obama on 'lack' of U.S. roots Quote:
Adviser told Hillary Clinton to attack Barack Obama on 'lack' of U.S. roots
Washington - Hilary Clinton was urged by her chief strategist to undermine Barack Obama as a quasi-American whose "lack of American roots" are outside the political mainstream.
According to an inside-the-bunker article being published in The Atlantic on Monday, key adviser Mark Penn ridiculed Obama's "boyhood in Indonesia and his life in Hawaii, " arguing Obama's multicultural diversity could be exploited.
Penn, in a memo to Clinton, urged that "every speech should contain the line you were born in the middle of America" and include "the deeply American values you grew up with, learned as a child and that drive you today.
"Let's explicitly own 'American' in our programs, the speeches and the values. He doesn't. Make this a new American Century, the American Strategic Energy Fund. Let's use our logo to make some flags we can give out. Let's add flag symbols to the backgrounds."
Penn added, "I cannot imagine America electing a President during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values."
| And some interesting hindsight on the Hillary fall: Clinton told to portray Obama as foreign - Politico.com Print View Quote: Clinton told to portray Obama as foreign
Mark Penn, the top campaign strategist for Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign, advised her to portray Barack Obama as having a “limited” connection “to basic American values and culture,” according to a forthcoming article in The Atlantic.
The magazine reports Penn suggested getting much rougher with Obama in a memo on March 30, after her crucial wins in Texas and Ohio: “Does anyone believe that it is possible to win the nomination without, over these next two months, raising all these issues on him? ... Won’t a single tape of [the Reverend Jeremiah] Wright going off on America with Obama sitting there be a game ender?”...
...A key take-away from the article is that Clinton received a lot of accurate advice, including from Penn. He wrote a remarkably prescient memo in March 2007 about the importance of appealing to what he called “the Invisible Americans,” specifically “WOMEN, LOWER AND MIDDLE CLASS VOTERS” — exactly the groups that helped Clinton beat Obama in key states nearly a year later.
But no one synthesized and acted on the good advice...
...“What is clear from the internal documents is that Clinton’s loss derived not from any specific decision she made but rather from the preponderance of the many she did not make.”...
...The famous 3 a.m. ad, written by Penn and approved by Clinton, almost didn’t run: “In the days leading up to Ohio and Texas, the campaign kept arguing over whether to air the [3 a.m.] ad. With the deadline looming, Bill Clinton, speaking from a cell phone as his plane sat on a runway, led a conference call on Thursday, Feb. 28, in which he had both sides present their case. As his plane was about to lift off, it was Bill Clinton — not Hillary — who issued the decisive order: ‘Let’s go with it.’ "...
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