In an interesting piece for The American Prospect, Paul Waldman argues that Barack Obama’s presidential campaign prepared for a lot of possibilities, but “there’s one thing it doesn’t seem they prepared for: Their main opponent, Hillary Clinton, is running like a Republican. And it appears to be working.”
[H]er campaign has begun to appear more and more as though it’s being run by Karl Rove or Lee Atwater. Pick your tired metaphor — take-no-prisoners, brass knuckles, no-holds-barred, playing for keeps — however you describe it, the Clinton campaign is not only not going easy on Obama, they’re doing so in awfully familiar ways. So many of the ingredients of a typical GOP campaign are there, in addition to fear. We have the efforts to make it harder for the opponent’s voters to get to the polls (the Nevada lawsuit seeking to shut down at-large caucus sites in Las Vegas, to which the Clinton campaign gave its tacit support). We have, depending on how you interpret the events of the last couple of weeks, the exploitation of racial divisions and suspicions (including multiple Clinton surrogates criticizing Obama for his admitted teenage drug use). And most of all, we have an utterly shameless dishonesty.
On some of these points, Clinton hasn’t yet reached GOP levels of underhandedness. But on the simple question of honestly characterizing their opponent, the Clintons are giving any Republican campaign in memory a run for its money.
From there, Waldman highlights a litany of instances that will no doubt be familiar to those who’ve been watching the campaign: misquoting Obama on Reagan; misquoting Obama on the “party of ideas,” casting doubt on Obama’s opposition to a war he’s always opposed; the race-based dispute; the Norquist-esque mailer in New Hampshire and Nevada, etc.
Waldman notes that Dems have always rallied to the Clintons’ defense because “no matter how much it seemed that Newt Gingrich or Ken Starr was going to defeat them, they never gave up and never stopped fighting. They weren’t afraid to get their hands dirty, and they did what it took to win.” But Dems’ comfort level is entirely different when the target shifts from Gingrich/Starr to a leading Democratic presidential candidate.
I think there’s certainly some merit to this, but I can’t help but wonder if the Clinton campaign’s do-what-it-takes style might resonate with Dems more than Waldman expects.
Waldman’s piece concluded:
The question this raises is how we really feel about ethically questionable campaign tactics. The fact is that we’re very quick to forgive a politician we support for hitting below the belt, if the belt in question is around the waist of another politician we dislike. We might ask ourselves, however, whether our readiness to do so is different in kind from the Republican willingness to tolerate torture, so long as it’s done to “bad guys” (OK, so many of them won’t just “tolerate” it, they’ll applaud it enthusiastically). Try to imagine that it’s nine months from now, Mitt Romney is the Republican nominee, and flyers begin appearing in mailboxes charging that as an elder of the Mormon church, Romney participated in bizarre, cult-like rituals that may or may not have involved slaughtering puppies. Would you say that the attack was beyond the pale, but crack a secret smile when Romney was forced to deny that he was a puppy-killer?
Allen Raymond, the Republican operative who went to jail for his role in the New Hampshire phone-jamming scandal, writes in his new tell-all, “When it came to playing in the gutter, we were the professionals — the Dems weren’t even junior varsity.” But one can’t deny that there are quite a few Democrats who know their way around the gutter, too.
In principle, I suspect most Dems would find this persuasive. We don’t want our campaigns to succeed on cheap shots, misrepresentations, slash-and-burn tactics, and loose ethics.
At least, we say we don’t. But this brings me back to a point I raised last week. I doubt the Clinton campaign would raise the point intentionally, but isn’t it possible that Clinton aides would use their rough-and-tumble style as a selling point? In other words, might not the Clinton campaign subtly argue, “If you think we’re taking some cheap shots with Obama, just wait until we’re taking on the Republicans in the fall”?
I was doing a radio show the other day with my good friend Bill Simmon and we talked a little bit about this on the air. I can’t remember his exact words, so this is a paraphrase, but when I mentioned some of the Clintons’ no-holds-barred tactics, he said, “Isn’t that what we want now?”
Bill’s not a Clinton supporter, but I have a hunch his sentiment isn’t unusual in Democratic circles. A lot of the party has seen Rove-style swiftboating since the 2000 campaign, and they’ve seen it work. Dems have tried decency, and have insisted that we stay out of the gutter, and voters didn’t exactly reward the party’s honesty and class.
In this sense, the Clinton campaign may be sending a signal — by using ethically-dubious, morally-flexible tactics, they’re highlighting what they’re willing to do to win. For every Dem out there who finds this offensive, I can’t help but wonder if there’s another Dem who likes the idea of a candidate who plays by Republican rules.