Hillary Clinton is doing what second-place candidates in two-person races must do: swing hard. On Friday, she challenged Barack Obama on the truthfulness of a pair of campaign mailers that she says misstate her positions:
Clinton said Obama’s mailers, which have been circulating in some states since Super Tuesday, were “tactics that are right out of Karl Rove’s playbook…”
“Shame on you, Barack Obama,” Clinton said. “Meet me in Ohio. Let’s have a debate about your tactics.” The senators have been scheduled for a debate Tuesday in Cleveland.
She may be swinging hard on this issue because she is right. Nonpartisan Factcheck.org checked out the mailers and generally agrees with Clinton’s assessment:
- Trade: A mailer showing a locked plant gate quotes Clinton as saying she believed NAFTA was “a boon” to the economy. Those are not her words and Obama was wrong to put quote marks around them. In fact, she’s been described by a biographer as privately opposing NAFTA in the White House.
- Health Care: A second mailer said Clinton’s health care plan “forces everyone to buy insurance, even if you can’t afford it.” We have previously said that mailer “lacks context” and strains the facts. But both Obama and Clinton have been exaggerating their differences on this issue.
This raises the possibility that the Obama campaign is doing what frontrunners should never do: becoming over-confident and sloppy.
[…] Publisher wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptTrade: A mailer showing a locked plant gate quotes Clinton as saying she believed NAFTA was “a boon” to the economy. Those are not her words and Obama was wrong to put quote marks around them. In fact, she’s been described by a … Read the rest of this great post here Posted by […]
Clinton is right :”Shame on You Barack Obama”. You promise a new kind of politics, and here you resort to uggly underhanded tactics, lying about your opponent position. Worse yet , you do that when you are ahead and have momentum.
I hope voters around the country can now see the real you, and the phony hiding behind the empty rhetoric.
I hope for Democrats that the party will see in due time that they would make a big mistake with you as candidate, and they may lose yet one more presidential election…. McCain will not let you get away with empty promises. When it comes to the important issues of National Security and Commander in Chief, the choice will be obvious.
Yawn, but why does she keep flying to India and get TATA consultantcy to come to NY (her own state) and only get 10 jobs. Tata is now using their Buffalo office as job outsource to India.
Maybe you folks should do a little bit more research on Clinton and her H1B visas, heck, maybe your job will be outsource to India one of these day.
By John Solomon and Matthew Mosk Washington Post Staff Writers Saturday, September 8, 2007; Page A01
When Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton flew to New Delhi to meet with Indian business leaders in 2005, she offered a blunt assessment of the loss of American jobs across the Pacific. “There is no way to legislate against reality,” she declared. “Outsourcing will continue. . . . We are not against all outsourcing; we are not in favor of putting up fences.”
The two speeches delivered continents apart highlight the delicate balance the senator from New York, a dedicated free-trader, is seeking to maintain as she courts two competing constituencies: wealthy Indian immigrants who have pledged to donate and raise as much as $5 million for her 2008 campaign and powerful American labor unions that are crucial to any Democratic primary victory.
Despite aggressive courtship by Democratic candidates, major unions such as the AFL-CIO, the Teamsters and the Service Employees International Union have withheld their endorsements as they scrutinize the candidates’ records and solicit views on a variety of issues.
Facing a cool reception, Clinton and her advisers have used closed-door meetings with labor leaders in recent months to explain her past ties to Indian companies, donors and policies. Aides have highlighted her efforts to retrain displaced workers and to end offshore tax breaks that reward companies that outsource jobs.
But the Clinton camp has been pressed by labor leaders on her support for expanding temporary U.S. work visas that often go to Indians who get jobs in the United States, and it has been queried about the help she gave a major Indian company to gain a foothold in New York state. That company now outsources most of its work to India.
Clinton declined repeated requests for an interview about her views on outsourcing. Her campaign advisers, however, say she believes there are no inconsistencies in the comments she has made here and in India or in her actions as a senator.
At a recent event in Los Angeles, host Nadadur Vardhan told those gathered that they should support Clinton because “she may shift more jobs to India,” according to an Indian news account.
Both Clintons made repeated trips to India — visits that continued during Hillary Clinton’s tenure in the Senate. Between them, Bill and Hillary Clinton have made eight visits to India since 2001, and many more to Indian American groups in the United States.
Some Indian American connections have benefited the Clintons personally, too. Vinod Gupta, the founder of a Nebraska data-mining firm, has donated more than $1 million to the Clintons’ political causes while also paying the former president at least $3.3 million as a business consultant.
Among labor officials, a nagging question about Hillary Clinton’s commitment to protecting U.S. jobs stems from a deal she helped broker for Tata Consulting, one of India’s largest technology firms. In 2002, Clinton helped Tata land an agreement to open an office in New York state and to work with a Buffalo area university to create at least 100 jobs in the depressed community.
Tata is one of the largest users of the temporary-worker visas that have allowed U.S. technology companies to fill jobs with high-skilled, lower-paid Indian workers. It used nearly 8,000 such visas last year, according to a recent Senate report.
As a senator, Clinton has repeatedly supported that program and backs raising the cap for annual visas from the current 65,000 to 115,000.
Putting quotes around “a boon” might be in error but I believe that Hillary has often touted NAFTA as a milepost in her husband’s accomplishments.
Her anger was certainly out of order.
To be factual…
Barack Obama is the new captain of “The Swift Boat!”
Congratulations MOBY DICK!!!
You’ve mastered the ART OF SLIME.
Scum and slime are real smelly and hard to wash off … Just ask O.J.
It’s a MO-FO to remove homeboy.
TEMPEST IN A CHINESE TEA CUP
Wasn’t Obama speech using the NY Times statement that put the quotation marks around the word BOON? The NY Times later corrected itself by saying that its quotation marks were not valid. It looks like Obama staff went with the accuracy of the NY Times article..
I hope that Democrats will take a second look before supporting Obama and throwing away Hillary. She has been kicked to the curb after being a loyal, faithful Democrat. Shame on you Obama and the blind sheep that follow you. You are a typical politican, nothing more, except with less experience.
Shame on you Obama. You and your surrogates are disgraceful. Although I have been a democrat and voted democrat in the past, I will be voting for John McCain should Obama become the nominee of the democratic party. This distortion is way too much. Where is the “hope and change”?
We all know that obama has a “lean and mean Machine” that was tooled in Illinois. Everybody knows the Daleys and how they helped Obama. Why hasn’t Hillary gone after him before? I personally have been offended by Michele Obama and today I heard a group of women who would have voted for Obama but she so turned them off that they are going to support McCain should Obama get the nomination. Of course they worry about his lack of experience and they know what to expect from McCain. There will be no surprises there. At any rate I hope Ohio, Texas and Pennsylvania give Hillary the boost she needs. The latte crowd is so mesmerized by Obama that it seems like their emotions are guiding them rather than reasoning. Personally I think we need a nominee who has demonstrated she is a can do person not a person who plays on hope and platitudes.
Oh, get over yourselves, all you anti-Omaba screechers.
Hillary may have *privately* disliked Nafta. that did *not* stop her from thanking all the supporters for Bill (she went to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and thanked various praised corporations for mounting “a very effective business effort in the U.S. on behalf of NAFTA.” ),
She made numerous speeches touting the president’s support for NAFTA as well. And while this does not imply that she herself liked NAFTA, that is *physical* support she supplied. Just because I might not like carrying a heavy weight, if I *do* pick it up, I am supporting it.
If you really want to compare the two candidates, compare their bills. Hillary is *very* careful not to step on corporate toes. Obama is less so. ‘Nuff said.
I see there are a number of McCain posters here that pretend they are/were neutral.
If one real misdeed here by Omaba was enough to have you knock him off your pedestal, he wasn’t on your pedestal to begin with. Hillary has made more errors than this. It could be that the main stream media wants to write stories to churn the waters thinking that Obama is getting too much favor. And by the way, if Hillary were to win, I would vote for her too.
Please read the ENTIRE factcheck.org article. It is very balanced and stated that Senator Clinton has engaged in the SAME shenanigans and, generaly, has misrepresented Senator Obama more severely.
All this hair-splitting and “she did it too” is a nice try at changing the subject, but the point is, St. Barack promised a new style of politics, but in a move that smacks of desperation to knock Clinton out of the race, he engaged in the old style of politics.
Either the mailers contain false claims or they don’t. “Yeah but…” is still “yes, he did.”
Folks, this blogger is simply wrong. Here’s some proof with video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvkkR2Rdw7s
Obama did not misrepresent her on either of the 2 mailers she got so upset about.
Let’s stick to the subject instead of going the republican route and start talking about other things.
She may be right, But, I getting sick of watching Ant “B.” scolding Opie …