Subscribe to Breaking NewsRichardson Calls the Clintons on Their Gutter Politics
For progressives, the gutter politics of the Clintons are no laughing matter.
No sooner than Bill Richardson endorsed Barack Obama for president than the Clintons loosed their attack dogs on him. “Mr. Richardson’s endorsement came right around the anniversary of the day when Judas sold out for 30 pieces of silver, so I think the timing is appropriate, if ironic,” snarled James Carville — the ultimate Clinton attack dog; in doing so, Carville used the week holy to Christians to implicitly compare Hillary Clinton to Jesus Christ, but he is hardly unique among Hillary’s supporters, who seem to view her campaign as a kind of Second Coming. Famous for having produced the theme of Bill Clinton’s winning 1992 campaign, “It’s the economy, stupid,” Carville is the archetypal Clinton operative for whom public policy is only the subject of campaign sloganeering and gaining power is the only thing.
“I’m not going to get in the gutter like that,” Richardson responded on “Fox News Sunday” when asked about Carville’s characterization as a Judas. “And you know, that’s typical of many of the people around Senator Clinton. They think they have a sense of entitlement to the presidency,” the governor of New Mexico added. “I am very loyal to the Clintons,” said Richardson, but he said he wanted something beyond “Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton,” referring to the pattern of dynastic condominium that the Bush/Clinton presidencies represent. “You know, what about the rest of us?” Richardson asked. Obama is the first viable African American presidential candidate and Richardson is the only sitting Latino governor, and the latter’s endorsement was eagerly sought by both the Clinton and Obama campaigns.
To sit here and pretend that I like Bill Richardson would be fairly disingenuous–it’s rare that you meet someone *that* interested in getting back to Washington. That said…
@ Jose and Maria: For those who call this an affront to the Hispanic community, who call him a snitch and a backstabber…I’d ask: where the hell were you when this man was running for President?
The reality is that Richardson had very little in the way of institutional support from the Latino community during his run (sans, perhaps, Jimmy Smits). His decision to drop out of the presidential race before Nevada is proof positive of that fact.
Why should Bill Richardson show loyalty to a group that, for the most part, showed absolutely no loyalty to him?
That’s crazy.
Maria, Hillary’s whole pitch to the superdelegates is precisely that they should ignore the will of the people in the districts and states that many of them represent, so it strikes me as being the height of hypocrisy for the Clintonites to attack Bill Richardson for following Hillary’s injunction and voting as a superdelegate for the person he thinks would make the best president (viz., Obama).
As for ‘the will of Hispanics,’ if your argument is that politicians and elected officials have an obligation to support the candidate who has won the overwhelming majority of votes from the community from which they come, by that logic, the fact that Obama has won close to 90% of the African American vote obligates all black elected officials and superdelegates to support Obama for president; isn’t that the logical conclusion of your argument…?
Jose, Bill Richardson showed tremendous courage in being willing to stand up to the Clinton attack machine and vote his conscience; how does that make him a ’snitch’ or a ‘back-stabber’?
Gordon, These allegations have all been debunked; they are nothing but a string of guilt-by-association charges with no evidentiary support. Ayers may have been with the Weather Underground decades ago, but he has had no association with terrorism since then, so to try to connect Obama to terrorism through Ayers is simply absurd. And the notion that Khalidi is a terrorist simply because he supports the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people is nothing but prejudice against the Palestinians; trying to link Obama to terrorism by his association with a respected Arab Muslim scholar is part and parcel of the attempts to label him a Muslim even though he is not and simply demonstrates that Islamophobia is part of the bias against Obama. No legitimate news organization has ever linked Obama to terrorism of any kind, and these allegations are just the latest in the smear campaign against Obama and show how low the Clintons will sink in trying to discredit him. Gutter politics, indeed.
The Gutter Politics:
Obama promised a new style of politics. Yet, since January, he has been tossing one insult or accusation after another at Bill Clinton. Obama has suggested Clinton achieved nothing of importance during his tenure and that the Republicans were the party of ideas. Obama gave tacit approval to let his surrogates accuse Bill Clinton of racism. And now Obama stands by silently while a top military adviser accuses the former President of acting like Josephy McCarthy.
Perhaps the Obama campaign did not really consider how Latino Democrats and American voters as a whole will view the endorsement of Bill Richardson.
The lowest form of life in almost any segment of American society is a snitch or a back stabber.
Bill Richardson’s actions proved that he can be on your side one day and on the other side the next. “Typical” politican.
Endorsement of Senator Clinton would have proven Bill Richardson to have at least have a semblance of loyalty. Besides, what good is his endorsement now?
Endorsement of Barak Obama shows that Bill Richardson will turn on anyone if he thinks it will benefit Bill Richardson.
More change we can believe in…
I’m a hispanic and all I can say is that Richardson’s endorsement does not represent the will of hundreds of thousands of hispanics that favored Hillary Clinton in the past primaries and in the ones to come. His endorsement actually will have a negative effect on the hispanic community. Already hispanic leaders are talking about repudiating Richardson’s endorsement publicly. His endorsement means the same as Kerry’s and Kennedy’s: Nothing. They all went against the will of their own people (Mass., Hispanics, NM) and endorsed Obama even though Hillary Clinton was favored in this states. All I can say.. “birds of a feather.. flock together”.
Pauline,
I think what Aaron is talking about is the new developments that came to light over the weekend.
Here is the News:
What do William Ayers, former Weather Underground, and Rashid Khalidi, the professor at Columbia University who arranged the Ahmedinejad visit and has direct ties to the PLO, and Barack Obama have in common? According to well placed sources, Barak Obama and William Ayers directed money to Rashid Khalidi, the Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University. Khalidi has long been at the center of controversy for his anti-Israeli, pro-Palestinian statements. In 2005, Khalidi was barred from participating in a teacher training program in the New York City public school system for his extremist statements.
Allison Davis, who hired Obama into his small, Chicago law firm, Davis, Miner, Barnhill, in 1993, left the firm in late 1999 or early 2000 and became a housing developer. Davis then went into business with Tony Rezko, who he met when Rezko was a client of the firm. Rezko is presently under indictment for demanding kickbacks from companies seeking state business under Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich. In October 2006, Rezko was indicted for extortion of businesses seeking to do business with the Illinois Teachers Retirement System Board and the Illinois Health Facilities Planning Board. He was also charged with wire fraud for staging false transactions of his pizza stores in order to secure $10 million in loans from GE Capital. Rezko is a fundraiser for Obama.
Obama has been identified as one of the politicians cited in the indictment as receiving political contributions from Rezko out of the kickback funds. Tony Rezko hosted fundraising events for Obama in his home and was on Obama’s U.S. Senate campaign finance committee which mobilized $14 million for him. Obama has already returned $85,000 that Rezko and family had personally donated to him.
Connections continued:
While a state senator in early 2000, Obama served on the board of the Woods Fund, a Chicago-based foundation focused on making grants to increase opportunities for less advantaged people and communities. The chairman of the Woods Fund board in 2000 was Howard Stanback, who, like Obama, also had connections to Davis. Davis submitted a grant request to the Woods Foundation for a $1 million investment in his development partnership, Neighborhood Rejuvenation LP that would be used to build low-income senior housing. By policy, a board member is supposed to recuse themselves from decisions where they have a business or personal relationship. Obama, however, did not. In fact, Obama voted to approve Davis’ grant request. Stanback, on the other hand, abstained from voting. The housing project, which also received a $5.7 million loan from the city, added almost $70,000 in political campaigns, including his presidential bid. Rezko gave Obama his first two political contributions in 1995, $1,000 each from two of his companies. In 1998, State Senator Obama wrote letters to city and state officials urging them to fund a Davis-Rezko housing project.
The fundraisers continue:
Another significant fundraiser for Obama is William Ayers, who sat on the board of the Woods fund with Obama and is also a professor at the University of Chicago. Bill Ayers, along with his wife Bernadine Dohrn, was a member of the Weather Underground, a radical extremist group that conducted a series of direct actions against the US government throughout the early to mid-1970s. Ayers and Dohrn went underground in 1970 after others in the group accidentally exploded a bomb in a Greenwich Village townhouse, which killed three of them including Ayers’ girlfriend at the time. During the period Ayers and Dohrn were in hiding, the Weather Underground participated in the bombings of the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon and a State Department building. In 1981 Ayers and Dohrn turned themselves in, but all charges were dropped as a result of the government legal misconduct. In his 2001 memoir, Ayers wrote, “I don’t regret setting the bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.” Ayers and Dohrn held at least one fundraiser for Barack Obama in their home in Chicago.
During Obama’s last year on the board of The Woods Fund (2002), he participated in awarding grants, including a $70,000, two-year grant to the Arab American Action Network, a Chicago-based group founded by Rashid and Mona Khalidi. Like Ayers and Rezko, Rashid Khalidi also held a fundraising event in his home for Obama. From 1972-83, Khalidi was the director in Beirut of the official Palestinian press agency, FAFA. His wife worked there as well. When the Khalidis left Chicago for Columbia University where Rashid had been given the Edward Said Chair in Arab Studies, their leave-taking party included testimonials from Bill Ayers and Barack Obama.
Aaron, I’m not a reporter, but I can tell you that the alleged connection with the Weather Underground has been looked into and debunked; there’s no ‘there’ there.
Seth, You don’t cite any source for this article, but I find the assertions made in it dubious at best. The Clintons are very skilled at putting out disinformation; they are also the last people who should be talking about shady connections, and here, I would simply cite Bill Clinton’s last-minute pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rubin.
Pauline,
Could you investigate and report on this issue?
There is a far-reaching scandal brewing for presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama, thanks to a radio talk show host based in Oregon. Syndicated talk host Laurie Roth’s revelations make the news story about Obama’s relationship with a racist, anti-American pastor look like child’s play.
A former top official at the Pentagon and a former CIA intelligence officer maintain that Barack Obama and former Weather Underground master honcho William Ayers funneled money to Professor Rashid Khalidi, a known terrorist sympathizer.
Obama knew his patriotism was in question when he showed up on Tuesday with his American flag drapery behind him. It was a major deal behind the scenes before the big news conference of how many flags to use. 8 flags — count ‘em — 8 flags from a man who supports a spiritual advisor and a congregation — to the tune of $25,000 years — who do not support the country Obama is campaign to be president. Obama’s hauls out his patriotism when it can work for his political advantage. The only surprise this week was how naive and sell out Bill Richardson turned out to be.
Barack Obama: toxic mentors start to corrode pristine campaign.
The Democrat was surging ahead but now revelations about the men who helped shape him are putting voters off.
Long before Barack Obama launched his campaign for the White House, when he was considering a run for the US Senate in 2003, he paid an intriguing visit to a former Chicago sewers inspector who had risen to become one of the most influential African-American politicians in Illinois.
“You have the power to elect a US senator,” Obama told Emil Jones, Democratic leader of the Illinois state senate. Jones looked at the ambitious young man smiling before him and asked, teasingly: “Do you know anybody I could make a US senator?”
According to Jones, Obama replied: “Me.” It was his first, audacious step in a spectacular rise from the murky political backwaters of Springfield, the Illinois capital.
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The exchange also sealed an intimate personal and political relationship that is likely to attract intense scrutiny amid the furore over Obama’s links to some of Chicago’s most controversial political and religious power brokers.
Obama has often described Jones as a key political mentor whose patronage was crucial to his early success in a state long dominated by near-feudal party political machines. Jones, 71, describes himself as Obama’s “godfather” and once said: “He feels like a son to me.”
Like the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the outspoken pastor of Obama’s Chicago church, and like Tony Rezko, the millionaire fundraiser and former friend of Obama who is on trial for corruption, Jones is in danger of becoming a hindrance to his protégé’s presidential ambitions.
For almost a year Jones has used his position as leader of the state senate to block anticorruption legislation passed unanimously by the state’s lower house. He has also become embroiled in ethical controversies concerning his wife’s job and his stepson’s business.
None of them is linked to Obama, but the Democratic contender can ill afford another scandal related to his former Chicago allies. Despite his electrifying speech on race last week, the opinion polls make worrying reading for the senator and his aides. Hillary Clinton appears to be regaining lost ground and John McCain, the Arizona senator who has sewn up the Republican nomination, has edged ahead of his warring rivals.
When Obama stood before a row of American flags in Philadelphia on Tuesday, he faced the greatest challenge of his candidacy. His campaign was reeling from the potentially fatal fallout of Wright’s rabid videotaped sermons, in which the Chicago preacher exclaimed, “God damn America,” and said that the US government had invented Aids to infect black people.
Obama’s response was hailed as one of the bravest and most eloquent speeches on race delivered by an American politician. Even conservative commentators such as Charles Murray of National Review called it “flat-out brilliant”; Michael Gerson, former speechwriter to president George W Bush, called it “one of the finest political performances under pressure” since John F Kennedy addressed concerns about his Catholicism in 1960.
Other analysts, Democrat and Republican, took a different view of Obama’s refusal to turn his back on Wright – whom he portrayed as part of an embittered legacy of discrimination.
Some saw it as a potential gift both to Clinton, who has been surging in opinion polls since videos of Wright were posted on the internet, and to McCain, whose aides have begun to wonder whether Obama might prove an easier target than Clinton in November.
“Nothing could be more dangerous to Mr Obama’s aspirations than the revelation that he, the son of a white woman, sat Sunday after Sunday – for 20 years – in an Afrocentric, black nationalist church in which his own mother, not to mention other whites, could never feel comfortable,” said Shelby Steele, a Stanford University historian and author of a book on Obama.
Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing radio talk-show foghorn, expressed the popular view more succinctly: “No country wants a president who is a member of a church with this kind of radicalism as its mainstream.”
The latest polls confirm that, for all the acclaim heaped on Obama’s speech by political insiders, voters seemed to be taking a sharp step back from the charismatic candidate who built his campaign on the promise of a break from “old politics”. One of Obama’s best-known slogans – and the title of his bestselling book – is “the audacity of hope”, a phrase that originally came from one of Wright’s sermons.
In Pennsylvania, the next big state to hold a primary, on April 22, Clinton has doubled her lead in the past two weeks and is now 26 points ahead. In North Carolina, which votes on May 6, Obama has been leading comfortably all year but is now only one point ahead. A national Gallup poll on Friday put Clinton ahead of Obama by two points for the first time since January.
Unfortunately for Democrats, their nomination battle seems to be helping McCain. The Republican rose to a eight-point lead over Obama and a 10-point lead over Clinton in Rasmussen tracking polls released on Friday.
Obama retains an almost insurmountable lead in the crucial count of convention delegates who will pick the Democratic nominee, and on Friday he picked up a useful endorsement from one of those delegates – Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico, one of America’s leading Hispanic politicians. Richardson had been close to the Clintons and was regarded as a possible vice-presidential choice for Hillary. His first task will be to rally Hispanic voters in the hope of averting late primary losses that would damage Obama’s chances of picking up uncommitted party officials – the so-called superdelegates likely to decide the contest.
Other Democrats are worried that Obama may have given his Republican rivals the ammunition needed to undermine his campaign. McCain insists he will not engage in dirty tricks, and his aides distributed a memo last week warning Republicans to stay away from “overheated rhetoric and personal attacks”.
Yet Republican surrogates are drooling at the prospect of linking Obama to Wright’s rants.
They intend to ask why he has stopped wearing an American flag badge on his lapel, and why his wife, Michelle, said at a rally: “For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country.”
The Clinton camp is treading carefully, aware that overt attacks on Obama might alienate black voters. Yet the New York senator’s aides are quietly pleased by what they regard as an overdue scrutiny of Obama’s past. They believe he will come to be seen not as some Messiah but as an unusually gifted political hack who has made compromises with dodgy associates, just like most other American politicians.
That intensifying scrutiny may soon lead to Jones’s Illinois door, and to further uncomfortable insights into the unflattering political realities that accompanied Obama’s climb from obscurity.
At one point during Obama’s 2003 Senate campaign, Jones set out to woo two African-American politicians miffed by Obama’s presumption and ambition. One of them, Rickey “Hollywood” Hendon, a state senator, had scoffed that Obama was so ambitious he would run for “king of the world” if the position were vacant.
When Jones secured the two men’s support, Obama asked his mentor how he had pulled it off. “I made them an offer,” Jones said in mock-mafioso style. “And you don’t want to know.”
Jones is now at the centre of a long row over his attempt to block proposed laws cracking down on his state’s “pay-to-play” tradition – whereby companies hoping to win government contracts have to contribute to the campaign funds of officials.
Jones’s staff say he blocked the bill because he intends to produce something tougher. No proposals have appeared.
Cynthia Canary, an activist against corruption who is fighting to have the laws passed, says Obama had little choice as an Illinois politician but to deal with an ethically dubious regime. “You hold your nose and work through the system,” she said.
Yet she also thinks America is being done a disservice by those who portray Obama as somehow above the uglier wheeler-dealing of politics. “He’s a pragmatic politician, and in the end if you think that he’s superman, your heart is going to get broken.”
Dave, I agree entirely. This long, ugly campaign is only helping McCain and the Republicans. Unfortunately, Hillary shows every sign of being willing to fight all the way to the convention in August in order to take the nomination from Obama, even at the risk of damaging the party’s prospects in November.
I’m Canadian and as I along with many Canadians are getting pretty fed up with both these candidates although either one would be a far better choice for president in terms of a global perspective than John McCain. The process is far too long and its getting far too ugly for it to be even remotely inspiring anymore. Its hurting the Dems. glorious chance to regain power. Too bad. America cant afford to fritter away an opportunity to regain its lost standing in the world. There’s too much at stake. Best of luck and I hope things get resolved real soon.