Politico: ATLANTA – Illinois Sen. Barack Obama launched Sunday what his top aides described as a more aggressive bid to challenge “unbelievable falsehoods” pressed last week in Nevada by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and former President Bill Clinton.
With Obama’s new strategy, the Democratic nomination fight took on a new contour: It’s Obama versus two Clintons, not just one. And the line of attack emerging from his second consecutive primary loss appears to be this: The Clintons are a couple whose words cannot always be trusted.
“You know the former president, who I think all of us have a lot of regard for, has taken his advocacy on behalf of his wife to a level that I think is pretty troubling,” Obama told ABC’s “Good Morning America” in an interview taped Sunday and set to air Monday. “He continues to make statements that are not supported by the facts — whether it's about my record of opposition to the war in Iraq or our approach to organizing in Las Vegas. This has become a habit, and one of the things that we're gonna have to do is to directly confront Bill Clinton when he's making statements that are not factually accurate.”
The Clinton campaign response to Obama? Get used to President Clinton, described by the campaign as a “huge asset” who “will continue talking to the American people to press the case for Sen. Clinton.”
“Of course Sen. Clinton and Sen. Obama are the candidates on the ballot and she is winning because she is giving voice to the Americans who will provide real solutions to the challenges they face in their daily lives,” said her campaign’s statement, which stood by the Clintons' comments in Nevada as "facts."
Obama began to challenge the Clintons late in the Nevada campaign — a delay that David Axelrod, Obama’s chief media strategist, described Sunday as a mistake.
“I would concede that I think we were not fast enough in Nevada in terms of hitting back,” Axelrod said. “We need to be even more aggressive in calling out what are shameless falsehoods and distortions.”
Aides would not detail the more forceful approach, other than to say that Obama and surrogates would make the case directly.
Obama, who portrays his candidacy as the embodiment of a less divisive style of politics, runs the risk of losing credibility as he descends into more direct combat with the Clintons.
“People have heard a lot of things that just aren’t true from the mouth of the First Lady, from the mouth of the former president, from the mouth of the campaign," said Robert Gibbs, Obama’s communications director. "There is no question we will make sure that doesn’t happen.”
But Gibbs added: “We made the decision that we weren’t going to get stuck in the mud.”
Obama foreshadowed the strategy Sunday morning from the pulpit of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, where the late Martin Luther King Jr. once served as a pastor.
The Democratic primary unfolds to the north next Saturday, in South Carolina. But the Ebenezer Baptist Church service, with a sermon celebrating King, gave Obama a platform to address the black voters moving to the forefront of the presidential campaign.
Obama struck a chord of unity – political and racial harmony, but also compassion for gays, immigrants and people of different faiths. He praised King’s legacy and portrayed his candidacy as a vehicle to fulfill the work that King started. He offered uplifting rhetoric, but also tough love, acknowledging that “none of our hands are clean” when it comes to healing divisions.
“We can no longer afford to traffic in lies or fear or hate,” Obama told 2,000 worshippers at one of the nation’s most prominent black congregations. “It is the poison that we must purge from our politics, the wall that we must tear down before the hour grows too late.”
Obama also made a sly reference to efforts by Clinton campaign surrogates to raise his youthful drug use as an issue.
“I got in trouble when I was a teenager, did some things, folks now like to talk about it,” Obama said. “I needed some hope to get here.”
He remained on the offensive at a rally Sunday night in Columbia, S.C., running through cases in which he believes his record has been distorted. (At one event in Reno, Nev., last week, Obama spent half his speech trying to correct the record.)
This time, he delved deeply into his praise last week of Ronald Reagan.
“What I said was Ronald Reagan, back in the 1980s, was able to tap into the discontent of the American people,” Obama said. “There were Reagan Democrats. So what I said is we need to tap into the discontent of Republicans. I want some Obama Republicans. I want ‘Obamacans.’”
“So when I see Sen. Clinton, President Clinton distort my own words, saying Republicans are the only ones who had good ideas since the 1980s — that is not a way to move the debate forward,” Obama said.
Howie P.S.: Elvis is a politician who goes for his opponents strong point, like Rove did with John Kerry's war record. Booman Tribune says
"Obama is Undefeated" and "Reporting the truth about the delegate race would change the national narrative, and not in Clinton's favor."
Barack Obama
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