We need a bigger Haka

I left Harrisburg at 4:00pm. Got a parking ticket. 😦 The office was humming along. All the way home in the car I heard reports of municipal boards of elections swamped with lines to register before the doors even opened this morning. It would be wrong to assume that this was just Obama’s work. It was not. The Clinton campaign mailed out registration forms to many households and they did canvassing and many other things this weekend. My phone banking only turned up 2 Obamaphiles. The rest were either firmly in Hillary’s corner or undecideds. I LOVE undecideds. They want to be seduced. They want to be told that their vote is the most important thing in the world to you. And it is. They are very important people. I try to direct them to Hillary’s site to read the issues online. It is very nice to hear that there are so many people in PA who are sick and tired of Republicans and are willing to step outside their comfort zone and vote for a Democrat, especially Hillary, who has withstood so much negativity. Which brings me to the second thing that happened today.

The Confluence got to sit in on the Clinton conference call today with Howard Wolfson and Phil Singer. They made a couple of good points, which I’ll get to in a minute. But what I really want to talk about is the media. I was really disappointed in them. It’s sort of like finding out that the doctor you’ve been seeing is a quack. There were reporters from all of the major outlets but the questions were incredibly lame. It became clear after half an hour that they already had an agenda and just needed the campaign to provide the slip of the lip that would make their intention to go full-force look more credible. There were a couple major themes: James Carville called Bill Richardson a Judas Iscariot and Hillary made her adventures in Bosnia sound like an episode of Combat (Gen X-ers, go ask your parents. I only have a hazy memory myself)

And here is a perfect example of how Swiftboating works. You see, Swiftboating is not about telling lies about someone. No, Swiftboating is all about undermining a candidate’s credibility. Because once you make them less credible on one issue, it is easy to extend that idea to every other thing that comes out of their mouth. With Hillary’s experience in Bosnia, Wolfson and Singer read references from the NYTimes, Reuters and others from that period of time (3/25/96?) that described the conditions that Hillary travelled under. These news sources said that no first lady since Eleanor Roosevelt had travelled to such dangerous territory. The accounts gemmed with Hillary’s own description in her book that she was forced to cut short her visits to one airbase because of fighting nearby and that children that came to meet her on the tarmac needed to be quickly escorted away. Now, I don’t know if that qualifies as sniper fire but when I think about how Wes Clark was in a caravan in Bosnia and one of the personnel carriers just behind him plummeted off the side of a mountain, killing a couple of people, I am reminded that the former Yugoslavian republics were no vacation destination. People got hurt, killed. She took some risks going there.

But all that the “journalists” wanted to know is whether her words were an exact account of what happened. Did she exaggerate? Umm, you mean like when Gore said he invented the internet? Or when Kerry said he was wounded in battle in Vietnam? Yeah. That’s where they’re going with this. Well, it’s worked so well before.

Then there was this whole James Carville thing. Heck, we’re talking about JAMES CARVILLE! He’s the very definition of a loose tongued extrovert. For all I know, Carville and Richardson have a personal relationship. Maybe he meant it. Maybe he was thinking that it felt like betrayal and since it was Easter week, it was just a tiny leap to go from betrayal to Judas instead of someone like Jonathan Pollard or Kim Philby or Benedict Arnold. Richardson didn’t endorse Obama because he had ties to another country or because he had an ideological affiliation and was passing secrets. And he didn’t do it because he was treated poorly. I suspect he was courted by both camps quite assiduously. But maybe like Arnold, he was passed over promotion. No, I suspect that Carville picked Judas because there was probably a quid pro quo and because Judas’ ultimate sin was that he handed his friend over to that friend’s enemies. Hey, “if the shoe fits…” But all the “journalists” wanted to know is whether James Carville was going to apologize.

You know, I hope Carville doesn’t because this crap has got to stop. If you apologize, it just feeds their endless hunger for more. The press feels empowered when it can force the unfavorite to capitulate again and again.

Now, Wolfson and Singer were absolutely right on a couple of things. Obama’s got diddly squat in the Foreign Policy arena compared with Hillary. I challenge any Obamaphile to cite the last time Obama helicoptered into a war zone to check on the welfare of children or meet with various factions in Northern Ireland to gather information for her husband’s administration. Go on, Obamaphiles, I’ll wait. It will be a cold day in hell before you find anything. But the focus is all on insignificant inconsistencies in her recount of those events in order to make them negligible. The accomplishment will be drowned out by a sea of nitpicking and poking at her credibility. This is Swiftboating.

As for Obama, Wolfson and Singer correctly pointed out that Axlerod et al are pulling out all of the stops by painting Clinton as dishonest, deceitful, untrustworthy, and willing to do or say anything to win. And all of the words and phrases are intended to further undermine her credibility. If you say it enough, repeat it enough, go on the evening news shows and vomit it from now until April 22, maybe some of it will stick. This is the politics of personal destruction that Obama said he wanted to Change! But now he is engaging in it full force. And why is he going tsunami with the negative talk, our Golden One of Hope and Change? It’s because he doesn’t have a record of his own.

Yeah, we’ve got their number but what can we do about it? Well, what with the overt negativity, Swiftboating and the propagating of The Math meme, what we’ve got here is a full blown haka complete with bulging eyes and extended tongue. In the next couple of weeks, Obamaphiles are going to pour into PA from everywhere. And the only thing we can do is show them that we’re not backing down. We’ve got to turn out in record numbers during the campaign as well. Nothing says defeat and unpopularity as being outnumbered and outshouted by the other team. The only way to innoculate the voters is to be there, be visible and be heard. Let them know how much you support Hillary and how much you BELIEVE in her, not because you’ve got smoke in your eyes but because you know quality when you see and hear it.

They’ve got the media, they’ve got maniacs, they’ve got money, they’ve got no scruples. We’ve got the best candidate and each other. I think we can beat them.