Can we take candidates’ kindergarten pronouncements off the table?

December 3, 2007

I know I alluded to this earlier, but Hillary Clinton’s latest attack on Barack Obama is so foolish, it deserves a stand-alone piece.

Yesterday, I got an email from a regular reader noting that Clinton’s campaign had referenced in a press release an essay Obama wrote when he was in kindergarten, titled, “I Want To Become President.” In all sincerity, I assumed the email was a joke, parodying the intensity of the campaign season. There’s simply no way, I thought, that Clinton would reference something Obama wrote before first grade. I didn’t even make a note of it, because I assumed it was a joke.

It wasn’t. Obama, apparently as a subtle dig at Clinton, told a Boston audience yesterday, “I’m not running to fulfill some long held plans or because I think it’s open to me.” The Clinton campaign tried to turn the tables, citing decades of examples, including these:

In third grade, Senator Obama wrote an essay titled ‘I Want To Be a President.’ His third grade teacher: Fermina Katarina Sinaga “asked her class to write an essay titled ‘My dream: What I want to be in the future.’ Senator Obama wrote ‘I want to be a President,’ she said.” [The Los Angeles Times, 3/15/07]

In kindergarten, Senator Obama wrote an essay titled ‘I Want to Become President.’ “Iis Darmawan, 63, Senator Obama’s kindergarten teacher, remembers him as an exceptionally tall and curly haired child who quickly picked up the local language and had sharp math skills. He wrote an essay titled, ‘I Want To Become President,’ the teacher said.” [AP, 1/25/07 ]

This was, of course, completely serious. The press release included a quote from Clinton spokesman Phil Singer, who asked, “Senator Obama’s relatives and friends say he has been talking about running for President for at least the last fifteen years. So who’s not telling the truth, them or him?”

I have no idea what the campaign is thinking with something like this.

Ezra’s analysis struck me as spot-on.

This actually strikes me as the Clinton campaign in full scramble. Till now, I’ve been immensely impressed with the discipline of their attacks. Everything — everything — was narrative based, dedicated to furthering impressions of Obama as inexperienced. Over the last week or two, however, the campaign has moved into a full-court press, attacking Obama on anything and everything, in the hopes that something will stick. The focus on the inexperienced narrative has dissipated, giving way to attacks on policy (Social Security and health care), ambition, etc. Some of these assaults are fair, some aren’t, but the scattershot fusillade has certainly grown more desperate and less controlled, reflecting, I’d bet, the sentiments of the campaign.

When Obama talked about pursuing terrorists into Pakistan, Clinton said experienced candidates wouldn’t make such a comment. When Bob Novak talked about behind the scenes rumor-mongering and Obama responded, Clinton said experienced candidates know to ignore right-wing hatchet-men like Novak.

Every story was a new opportunity to reinforce the narrative the Clinton campaign had helped create. Now, they’re issuing press releases about essays Obama wrote before his ninth birthday. It’s not a wise strategy.

Part of my disappointment stems from expectations. The Clinton campaign has always impressed me as the most professional and disciplined operation on either side of the aisle. They don’t flail around wildly; they’re methodical and cautious.

And now they’re acting like they’re off their game, just as crunch-time hits. The Iowa caucuses are one month from today, and the meticulous campaign has taken to throwing kitchen sinks. Clinton’s campaign isn’t just referencing childhood essays; it’s making dubious personal charges about Obama’s character and integrity — the exact kind of attacks the campaign said should be avoided within the party.

Robert Reich, a long-time Clinton friend, believes the senator has started to push the envelope a little too much.

Yesterday, HRC suggested O lacks courage. “There’s a big difference between our courage and our convictions, what we believe and what we’re willing to fight for,” she told reporters in Iowa, saying Iowa voters will have a choice “between someone who talks the talk, and somebody who’s walked the walk.” Then asked whether she intended to raise questions about O’s character, she said: “It’s beginning to look a lot like that.”

I just don’t get it…. All is fair in love, war, and politics. But this series of slurs doesn’t serve HRC well. It will turn off voters in Iowa, as in the rest of the country. If she’s worried her polls are dropping, this is not the way to build them back up.

I’ve noticed that the Clinton campaign has, for months, been fairly quick to correct mistakes. With that in mind, I hope the senator drops these new attacks. They’re backfiring.

I don’t know that I’d be all that warm to the idea of a Chief Executive who just decided on the spur of the moment, apropos of nothing, that he/she’d like to run the show. Are we to infer that the thought of being president just occurred to Senator Clinton the day before she declared her candidacy?

  • It was silly of Obama to suggest he is in it for selfless, ambition-free reasons. In their over-zealous (dare I say desperate-seeming) attempt to pounce on Obama’s silly statement (and I’m not sure it was that great an opening even if Clinton handled it better), Team Clinton turned into the Keystone Kops, tripping over themselves, stepping on each other, and generally looking like a bunch of sleep deprived, over-caffienated college kids – which of course describes 90% of all campaigns.

    Clinton needs to take a deep breath, and insist her team does the same. All they have done is make the DM Register Iowa Poll look more important. The better response would have been a nonchalant “we were in the margin of error in October, we’re in the margin of error in November; this race is going down to the wire and I intend to work as hard as I can to meet Iowans and address their issues right through January 3, and I’m confident that if I do that, Iowans will pick a leader with the experience to make a real change from the mess the current administration has made.”

  • Good news for Edwards all around, as his two main rivals aren’t focused on him at the moment. He could sneak away with a win in Iowa yet.

  • Did Hillary stay inside the lines of her kindergarten coloring book? Did she talk during nap time?
    There must be something going on that we don’t know about. Stooping to this level is a sign of terrified desperation.

  • And even Peter Daou’s pimping polls on Daily Kos that were taken well before Obama’s post-Thanksgiving bump…

    I’m surprised by the complete Clinton machine meltdown as well.

    I know the CW is that they must be truly freaking out based on their internal polling. Maybe true, maybe not. But something’s going on in Hillary Town.

  • W.T.F? If he’d written an essay titled “I want to be a fire man,” in 1st grade would Camp HRC claim he can’t make up his mind?

    Why don’t they just join forces with the “OMG! He’s a stealth Mooslim!” crowd and claim this proves he was brainwashed to become PotUS? Gah!

    And um. No offense to his teachers, but I can’t remember crap I wrote two months ago. How the hell are they able to recall what one student wrote a few decades ago?

  • Of course Clinton is hung up on what Obama wrote in kindergarten since that is the current level of discourse she’s aiming for.

  • While I agree that the Clinton campaign looks a bit foolish digging up a kindergarten essay, they are justified in contesting the claim that Obama has repeatedly made that somehow HRC is bad because she has been planning a run for the WH for decades and he certainly hasn’t been. There were lot of discussions on this topic a few weeks ago after Obama made a similar dig during a debate. The consensus opinion at the time seemed to be that folks kinda like a candadate who is capable of long-range planning.

  • Who the hell writes essay’s in kindergarten?

    Ok, ok, I know that’s not the point, but come on!

  • the reality is that none of them would be anywhere close to where they are if they weren’t freakishly ambitious and have been nearly all of their lives (except Fred. he’s just caught up on the hype he cant live up to.) therein lies the disingenuousness of Obama’s effort to position himself as more “pure” than these mangy politicians.

    but the Clinton team’s reaction is even more nuts. i’m not so sure the internal polling is that bad. my theory is that sometimes the more precise something is engineered (or less positively, the more tightly it is wound) the worse it performs when something goes wrong. there is no “play.” the slightest piece of sand in the gears makes the whole thing fly apart; the intolerance for error is both the strength and the weakness. Where as a little more flexibility in the organization, a little “looser” style, helps ride out the bumps.

    then again, that could just the be projection-filled rationalization of someone who likes to sleep in and have a really really messy desk.

  • As I was reading this post, and the comments, I had a weird little thought…what if Clinton is trying to provoke some attacks on her character – and Bills’s – so she can get in some batting practice on the hard balls she expects will be pitched at her in the general election? Maybe she wants to see if she can get all the nastiness out of the way now.

    Could she be that calculating? Or is she just having a meltdown?

    Whatever it is she thinks she’s doing, she’s really just being her own bright, shiny object, allowing the media to skate away from Rudy just when it was getting to be a real story.

    Her timing really sucks. And her credibility is taking a nosedive.

  • All through elementary school I oscillated between wanting to be astronaut, a veterinarian and a queen. Unfortunately I didn’t become any of these when I grew up. Who knew I would turn into such a flip-flopper?

  • I can’t think of an “issue” that could be any more inane!
    1. Isn’t it obvious to anyone and everyone that the dreams of a kid in kindergarten or third grade are a *completely different* thing from the musings of a 30+ year old person in a position to actually contemplate a run for president as feasible? It is absurd to compare these two things as equivalent.
    2. Is there some problem (applied to ANY candidate) if he/she has been planning at *some* level for a long time? In the corporate world, if you come in at an entry level position and you determine within a year or two that you want to be CEO, and you then lay out for yourself an action plan that will get you there in 15 years, (or whatever reasonable time frame) that’s considered a STRONG POSITIVE QUALITY.
    These candidates shouldn’t be playing this game, and I wish the media would just ignore it.

  • My initial response on reading this was oh boy, here comes silly time. But I also couldn’t help wondering why Senator Obama would even say something like that.

    I mean OK, but you’ve got to admit that if he gave up his dream of being president after third grade, then it’s a pretty remarkable coincidence that he’s where he is now — right on the order of a sudden opportunity arising for me to become a fireman. And as for not running because the opportunity was open to him, that’s a silly thing to lie about too, even if it is just little one. I heard Obama himself say in an interview at the outset of the campaign that some were urging him to hold back and build up his resume a little more before trying it, but that sometimes you have to strike while the iron is hot.

    And it’s not like there’s anything wrong with having a long-held ambition to become president (unless you are Hillary Clinton, of course) or being persistent in the pursuit of one’s long held dreams, or striking when the iron is hot. Hell, it’s the American way. Most people would respect him for it. So why the hell would he make a statement like that? What was the context?

    I tried to track down Obama’s full statement but the trail trail seems to die at Ezra Klein. Then I remembered something I read on TPM recently and boom, pay dirt — really dirty dirt, in fact.

    Obama Camp Uses Disputed Gerth Account Of Clintons’ 20-Year-Plan To Fault Hillary
    By Greg Sargent – November 19, 2007, 10:55AM

    Barack Obama has unveiled a new line of criticism against Hillary: In speeches he’s started to point to the allegation made in Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta’s Hillary book that the Clintons secretly formulated a 20-year-plan to deliver the presidency first to Bill, and then to Hillary.

    “I’m not in this race to fulfill some long-held plan or because it was owed to me,” Obama said the other day. [emphasis mine]

    Asked if that were a reference to the Gerth allegation, an Obama spokesperson left virtually no doubt that it was, telling Newsday: “Barack Obama has not been mapping out his run for president from Washington for the last 20 years like some of his opponents.”

    Obviously that sentence I bolded sounds a lot like the one above. The TPM article goes on to say that, the source that Gerth and Van Natta cited with supposed first-hand knowledge of this plan has since vehemently denied it. Anyway, hint to Barack Obama: Don’t go around recycling long-discredited sleaze from Melon Scaife’s “Arkansas Project,” and do try and refrain from calling the kettle black if you’d rather not see you’re grade school writing assignments reprinted. Stupid begets stupid.

  • I’m confused at the conflicting tales. Kindergarteners are five years old and most can’t write, much less write an essay. Now, a third grader could do both.

    But isn’t this an extremely silly non-issue? I’ve no doubt a nine year-old child has the idealism and innocence to dream about being president someday and set the world right. At nine, one friend’s daughter was going to stop the killing of all baby seals when she was grown-up enough to have the authority to do it.

    I just think Obama expressed a young dream, like many kids do, and he’s on track with it now, even if he left it behind then. Some people, in fact, never change their youthful dreams and accomplish them in adulthood.

    But it really is a non-issue, and it’s ridiculous of Clinton to make a fuss about it.

  • I think it’s fair to say that Novak’s piece suggesting she had dirt on Obama was complete bunk. If they did, seems to me they would have used it before a 40 year old essay written in crayon.

  • Who writes essays in kindergarten? I remember the first essay I had to write was in the 6th grade, I had to write a six page report about the state of Minnesota and it was, at the time, the most daunting project I’ve ever had to deal with. Was Obama in some kind of super-kindergarten?

  • Annie: That was the other thing that struck me about this article. I was going to mention it in my previous comment (above) but that was already running too long, so I didn’t. I’m thinking of suing my grade school though. We sure as heck weren’t writing essays in my kindergarten class. I feel deprived.

  • Obama, apparently as a subtle dig at Clinton, told a Boston audience yesterday, Dec. 2nd 2007

    “I’m not running to fulfill some long held plans or because I think it’s open to me.”

    Why don’t you ask why he keeps repeating something that has so thoroughly been shown to be untrue. He said almost the exact same words last week in Harlem. He said it again in Boston on Dec 2nd.

    “I am not running to fulfill longheld plans” It just like Karl Rove in his first Newseeek column. Rove tells a story about being heir to Hillary’s WH office and finding a VANITY mirror there. HRC tells him it wasn’t true. Rove goes to some press event and despite knowing it was unture….tells it again. This story about Hillary and the presidency is false. Obama knows it’s untrue. He keeps repepating the lie.

    What does this say about him? What does it say about the liberal blogosphere that they focus…. not on his lies… but on her response to his lies?

    Why aren’t you folks asking why Obama keeps telling untrue stories?

  • I agree the attack was dumb.

    Clinton probably could have omitted just the school references, and kept the family-and-friends references, though, and still had something that was not ridiculous and that some people would have been interested in seeing (after Obama’s remark).

    I chalk it up to not enough oversight, probably a bad move by staff- nowadays you always have to look carefully at these things to avoid gaffes.

  • I’m very surprised at the Hillary campaign’s seemingly acts of desperation, which is highly unprofessional. Though, until now, I credited and commended her for her past achievements–and her personal responses to my previous communications to her about my concerns as my home state’s junior senator–this unprofessionalism on her part might change my heretofore positive feelings toward her.

  • debcoop (we meet again): I did ask. I also figured out why. (See my rather lengthy post above @ #18). Pretty damned sleazy on Senator Obama’s part, too.

    Even if Clinton’s response was a little silly in spots, it’s still a long way from excusing what Barack Obama’s been up to. Perhaps Clinton’s silliness will even serve to draw attention to Obama’s sleaze — might seem less silly if it did.

    (Yes, I’m still mad about the Whitewater “scandal.” Compare and contrast to Blackwater.)

  • Did it occur to anyone that Obama was taking a poke at the people who claim he’s a specially trained kung-fu jihadi ninja warrior just waiting to unleash Sharia law on the US?

  • The Clinton campaign will settle for nothing less than a sweep of every state. I’ve seen them make other slips besides this one, but this one clearly demonstrates their frustration at making any Obama narrative stick for longer than 2 weeks.

    The goal now is to throw spaghetti from any angle to see what sticks. If nothing does, they hope the pile of spaghetti will obscure anything Obama tries to present himself as.

    I don’t consider them the most disciplined. They’re just the loudest.

    Disclaimer: From 2nd grade till 9th grade, I wanted to be President. From the age of 40 on, I sought more honorable forms of prostitution.

  • $50 more dollars winging its way to Obama.

    Thanks Hillbilly…
    For the motivation.

    One more thing Hill….

    Should you somehow get elected…
    You can count on me to contribute money to right wing hate groups to waterboard you with some new made up whitewater.
    Don’t care if it is true.
    Don’t care if it is lies.
    All I will care is that it will help ruin your presidency.
    You asked for it.
    You got it.
    Count on me your friendly neighborhood liberal…

  • Obama was living in Jakarta at this point in his life. So, the Clinton camp shouldn’t worry. He meant President of Indonesia.

  • I used to sing the song “Hail to Myself” to the Hail to the Chief tune while I was just a fetus. Needless to say, I’ve already removed myself from all future presidential races. I’d let you know that I’m now only running for Emperor of the Universe, but I don’t want to blow my chances in case that actually becomes a position.

  • Hey, Jen@ #16 – that’s pretty funny, I laughed out loud. Say, oddly enough, those were Larry Craig’s picks, too! It’s good to see he successfully achieved one of them.

  • After commenting earlier that if Clinton’s apparent silliness served to draw attention to Obama’s use of discredited right-wing sleaze against her, it might start to seem rather less silly, I thought about that some more. The final paragraph of that TPM article that I referenced earlier came back to mind:

    “It’s hard to see how the use of Gerth’s allegations could possibly play well among Dem activists. Many of them dislike Gerth for his role in “breaking” the Whitewater story and see Gerth’s book as an anti-Hillary hatchet job.”

    So if you start with the assumption that the Clinton campaign is basically rational and by no means inept, then follow that forward, what happens next? Well the first thing that happens is that people flip out like they’re doing right now. The next is that everyone covering the campaign calls up Clinton HQ looking for a statement. Some people would call that an opening — i.e., to talk about what Obama has been up to lately. You’d definitely be playing with fire though. You would want to make damned sure you had your biggest guns lined up and ready to roll out the second that opening appeared, because there are a lot of ways you could screw that up.

    Then I was watching MSNBC at the gym just now and none other than Chris Lehane showed up on the Abrams Report to make Clinton’s case. He’s been only loosely affiliated with the Clinton campaign up to now so the fact that they were able to trot him out on short notice probably means they already had him all cued up in advance. That all but confirms my suspicion that this was probably an ambush.

  • Oh, bullshit.

    First of all, kindergardeners don’t talk like that.

    Secondly, Obama “wrote” an essay in kindergarden? An ESSAY? A five-year-old? Are you high?

    Kindergardeners can barely form letters properly, let alone spell “president”. If they write a sentence of more than 3 words, you got a genius. If they spell even one of them correctly, hooray.

    This is total crap. Third grade, I’d buy, maybe. But kindergardeners are highly unlikely to be capable of such things.

  • You people are all missing the crucial point here: When Boy Wonder Obama wrote those essays he was writing them in Indonesia, at a Muslim school, in Bahasa, not English. And in Bahasa, what’s being translated by our lazy media as “president” is actually closer to the meaning of “caliph.” Obama wasn’t dreaming of being the president of the USA or any other president. He was dreaming of the day he would rule over the worldwide Caliphate that the Islamofascists are hell-bent on creating in the 21st century. Hillary has come so close to revealing the ugly truth here, but here incompetent staff don’t speak Bahasa. Otherwise the sleeper plot would be revealed and Obama’s campaign would come unraveled overnight.

    (Note to Freepers, Drudge, and Rush, et al: This is satire.)

  • God…what a joke it is to pretend that the camp Hillary response to Obamas once again using the disproved Gerth fairy tale that there had been “20 year deal” between Bill and Hill to one day make both of then President was all about Barry’s days in kindergarten.

    The list of those quoted in the Clinton piece saying that OBama has ALWAYS said he’d be President one day ranged from recently to long ago. From Obama’s first days in the US senate, to his first days in the state senate, to his first days in law school, to his first meeting with Michelle Obammas brother to yes – his first days in school altogether, Obama has been quoted planning and predicting that “one day” he would be President. Personally, I find that kind of creepy…

    You know very well that the intent of that Clinton timeline was to show that Obama has had a …lifelong….desire…and belief that one day he would …er…rule the world…cum..be President.

    But you joined with the Obama, Matthews and Koss crowd and falsely pretend it was really only about the Clintons obsession with Obama’s days in kindergarten. Come on…

    And why is everyone pretending that a Clinton riff with Reich is new? That relationship went very sour a decade ago….and since then Reich has publicly campaigned against Gore in 2000 and Clinton campaigned against Reich’s bid to be Governor of Mass in 2002… Reich has been bitterly angry at the Clintons since they removed him from their cabinet and theyve been mad at him since he wrote a very critical book in response. Nothing new here….

  • Children are very smart capable human being. My four year was reading for I don’t know how long before I discovered he was actually reading. I thought he was just goofing around. So yes, FIVE year olds can write. Granted most of it is not the most legible you’ve ever seen and they do write essays (not adult length of course).

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