Following up on an item from yesterday, Hillary Clinton, for the first time, went after Barack Obama rather aggressively on the Jeremiah Wright controversy, apparently hoping to reignite a fire that had already gone out, while at the same time, redirecting reporters’ attention away from her admittedly false claims about her 1996 Bosnia trip.
Was the strategy successful? Partially. On the one hand, political observers did stop talking, at least temporarily, about the Bosnia controversy. On the other hand, however, instead of renewing the discussion of Wright and Obama, the prevailing question on people’s minds is whether Clinton has gone too far.
I mentioned in passing yesterday that Clinton decided to launch her new round of attacks while talking with the editors of a conservative newspaper. Josh Marshall fleshed this out in more detail.
This afternoon Greg Sargent and I were talking this over and one of us realized that this wasn’t just any Pittsburgh paper. It was the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, the money-losing, vanity, fringe sheet of Richard Mellon Scaife, funder of the Arkansas Project, the American Spectator during its prime Clinton-hunting years and virtually every right-wing operation of note at one point or another over the last twenty years or more.
In fact, what I only discovered late this evening, when Eric Kleefeld sent me this link at National Review Online, is that not only was it Scaife’s paper. Scaife himself was there sitting just to Clinton’s right apparently taking part in the questioning.
This alone has to amount to some sort cosmic encounter like something out of a Wagner opera. Remember, this is the guy who spent millions of dollars puffing up wingnut fantasies about Hillary’s having Vince Foster whacked and lots of other curdled and ugly nonsense. Scaife was the nerve center of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy. Those of us who spent years defending the Clintons from all that malarkey learned this point on day one.
I was tempted to compare this to Clinton launching a new offensive against Obama while on Fox News, but in reality, it’s far worse. She was sitting next to Richard Mellon Scaife, for goodness sakes.
Lest anyone think her comments to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review were inadvertent, and the candidate who places enormous value on message discipline just slipped during the editorial board meeting, note that Clinton repeated her “concerns” during a press conference yesterday afternoon.
A couple of things. First, you may have noticed that Clinton was largely reading her answer about Jeremiah Wright. In a press conference, it’s very unusual for a presidential candidate to respond to an unprompted question by literally sticking to a script. Answers are generally extemporaneous. The fact that Clinton read her answer from a prepared text suggests, in case there was any doubt, the campaign is deliberately trying to push this line of attack. It wasn’t just a random, off-the-cuff remark.
Second, Clinton insisted at the press conference, “I was answering a question that was posed to me.” Look, Clinton is extremely smart, and she’s been through more media interviews than almost any political figure in modern history. If she didn’t want to go after Obama on this, she could have brushed past the question posed to her. In fact, this story has been brewing for weeks, she’s been asked about it repeatedly, and she never said a word.
My sense is that this attack has backfired. Observers aren’t sitting around this morning asking, “Should we press Obama for more details about why he’s still with his church?” they’re asking, “Why on earth did Clinton do this?”
I suspect this isn’t what the campaign had in mind.