Clinton campaign going right-wing again: attacks Barack Obama for being too liberal

[Elyse]

From the New Yorker:



Clinton is stressing in all her appearances—another point that Penn sees as essential—that Obama will appear distinctly weaker on national-security questions in relation to McCain.


(This infuriates Obama’s supporters—after all, he alone among the surviving candidates opposed the invasion of Iraq.)


The Clinton campaign will also press the claim that Obama will not be able to withstand heightened scrutiny of his domestic-policy views. The implication is that Obama is unacceptably liberal, while Clinton, despite the similarity of her positions and voting record, is not. “How much do Independent voters really know about Barack Obama, his voting record, and his past positions?” Penn asked recently. “Certainly less than Democrats know. In a general election the Republicans would spring into action, and quickly, if he were the nominee, roll out his full record. And the kind of Independent support that you see in places like Idaho would consequently evaporate.”


Penn pushed this idea last week when he told me, “People want to have a nominee that’s going to win. So a lot of the things they accepted initially may not hold up. Independent and Republican support is diminishing as they find out he’s the most liberal Democratic senator”—a reference to recent rankings by the National Journal. “As they get more of a sense that he’s not ready to be Commander-in-Chief, a lot of Independents who were supporting him are disappearing.”


This electability argument—that Obama can be easily caricatured, that he’s weak on national security, that he’s too liberal—is not so very different from the Republican case against Obama, although the charges might be more damaging coming from a member of one’s own party, especially in a bruising campaign that may last until the Convention this August in Denver. It is tempting to say that the Clinton campaign’s plan is to burn the village in order to save it—that Hillary Clinton believes that Democrats, hypnotized by Obama, are making a historic mistake from which only she can rescue them. And it is tempting to add that this means the political destruction of the man who is still most likely to be the Democratic nominee.

[kingcap72]

But, yet, she's willing to be Obama's VP? Damn, Hillary really is showing her Sybil-like personalities.

[Grimmlok]

I love how 'liberal' is such a dirty, scary word. It's hilarious, considering how much stupidity and horror 'conservative' ideology has brought about. In fact, most (if not all) of the worlds horrors were brought about by people trying to restrict freedoms or hold onto some fucked up idealized vision of what the past was.

[Mr. Authority]

Liberal is only a dirty word in the mind of right-wingers. Name some liberal polticians/activists (Dennis Kuchinich, Al Gore, etc) and most apolitical people would see that they're harmless and good sane people.

Whereas conservative is increasingly being connected to the crazies (ie: Bush, Pat Robertson, Ann Coulter, etc.).