Just Wait Until The Republicans Get Ahold Of Him

John Heilemann’s New York Magazine piece, “The Meme Prisoner“,  is the best piece I’ve seen about the presidential campaign. (h/t The Page). It beautifully explains how we arrived the present zeitgeist.  Hillary can do no right, Obama no wrong, in the eyes of many, even the so-called liberal media, aka the New York Times, which has Pat Healy challenging the Clinton myth and Jeff Zeleny focusing on Obama’s epic rise.

In spite of the perception that the Clintons have gone negative and the Obamas have not, the senator is quoted pointing out:

• Obama’s camp also played the race card “playing up (Hillary’s) remarks about Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King.”
• (Obama’s campaign) had “basically condoned a really mean-spirited” Spanish-language ad in Nevada that asserted Hillary “does not respect our people.”
• They sent out a mailer lying about her health-care plan, with Harry and Louise look-alikes.
• (Obama) complained in Iowa about 527s and then had them supporting him like crazy in Nevada and California.

The piece also mentions:

• Clinton’s famous fumbling of a question about whether illegal immigrants should be allowed to have driver’s licenses in a debate last fall was hammered on for weeks-whereas Obama’s flubbing of the same question in the next debate was essentially let slide.

And former Dean and Edwards campaign manager Joe Trippi says his strategists were wise enough to understand that when it was time to go negative, they should never do so with TV ads but stick instead to more sub-rosa media, from radio and direct mail to robo-calls.

“In my experience in politics,” Trippi says, “nobody ever really gets called out on that crap.”

And let’s be ever-mindful of what awaits Obama should he become the nominee:

the Republicans aren’t terribly likely to (allow) the polite avoidance of discussing his controversial minister, his wayward youth, or, indeed, his blackness itself. Again and again, as Clinton often points out, the GOP has proved painfully adept at taking compelling, carefully honed meta-narratives and blowing them to pieces.

By: Alan

Alan Colmes is the publisher of Liberaland.