Clinton Memos: Obama Too Foreign

11 August 2008 |permalink | email article

The Atlantic’s forthcoming September issue offers demonizing advice from Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton’s chief strategist, which urged her to portray Barack Obama in the primaries as having a “limited” connection “to basic American values and culture.”

The magazine reports Penn offered much rougher treatment of Obama in a memo March 30, after Clinton’s critical 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 with him?”

The eight-page shocker, “The Front-Runner’s Fall,’ draws on internal memos, e-mails and meeting notes to reveal what Atlantic Senior Editor Joshua Green calls “the backstabbing and conflicting strategies that produced an epic meltdown.”

“[Her] advisers couldn’t execute strategy; they routinely attacked and undermined each other, and Clinton never forced a resolution. … [S] never behaved like a chief executive, and her own staff proved to be her Achilles’ heel.”

Penn wrote in a memo to Clinton excerpted in the article: “I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at its center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values.”

There’s no hint that any of the damaging Clinton material was ever leaked but the echo seems clear to me.

The proof is that John McCain’s campaign is channeling Penn’s message, starting with its code-like motto, ‘Country First,’ and diminishing Obama in sleezy ads as too aloof, too elitist, too foreign, too much of a celebrity – not quite American enough.

The buzz on all Sunday TV political shows and incessant chatter today is why Obama’s national lead over a hapless McCain remains so close. The relevant answer is Obama’s projected early strong lead in the Electoral College – and in nine of the 11 major battleground states.

As Andrew Sullivan wrote in online London Sunday Times, “Considering that the racial Rubicon that Obama is hoping to cross, perhaps what is striking is that a young black liberal Democrat is still the clear favorite.

“McCain has never led Obama in two months of a national match-up. That’s why it’s still Obama’s to lose.”

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