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Tuesday, October 07, 2008
Concerning The CNN Report On Obama And Ayres…
...linked here, all the comments so far have addressed whether the report was particularly good for McCain or particularly damaging for Obama. No Eternity Road reader has yet commented on its wider significance for American politics.
Has everyone forgotten Hillary Clinton? Has everyone forgotten how often, these past sixteen years, CNN has been disparagingly called the Clinton News Network?
CNN is riddled with Clinton partisans. The network's regular reportage and commentary during primary season was decidedly in Mrs. Clinton's favor. It would be shortsighted to imagine that what CNN is reporting on today has significance only for November 4, 2008. That would require the assumption that the Clintons have surrendered their ambition to return to power.
Mrs. Clinton still wants to be president. The principal obstacle to her goal is Barack Obama. Keeping Obama out of the Oval Office this coming term would greatly increase Mrs. Clinton's prospects for getting herself into it in 2012. If Obama prevails on November 4, then unless he's caught in flagrante delicto with an aardvark -- a male aardvark -- he'll be the Democrats' nominee for 2012. That would relegate Mrs. Clinton to 2016, when she'd be 69 years old and the Clinton machine would be all but rusted out.
Bill Clinton has stumped against Barack Obama for months, sometimes subtly, sometimes not. It's not reasonable to think he's the only person from his wife's camp who's carrying a torch for her campaign. Her allies in the Old Media are mobilizing in her interest as well -- and the CNN report on Obama's association with Bill Ayres and Bernadine Dohrn is only the first of the salvoes they'll fire under her colors.
Mrs. Clinton's media allies must walk a tighrope. They can't appear obviously committed to defeating Obama; that would cost them access to national Democrats, and to Obama himself should he win despite all. But they can help to propagate stories that show Obama in a questionable light, as long as the facts reported are unimpeachable. If those stories originate as McCain / Palin accusations, the Old Media outlets that cover them can always point backward at their Republican origins. "We didn't start this," they can say in self-exculpation, "we're just fulfilling our role as fact-checkers and journalists."
It's foolish to think the Clintons, the most political people in America if not the world, are thinking only about the election four weeks from today. It's even more foolish to think they'd refrain from playing all the cards they still hold against the Chicago upstart who denied them the triumphant return to the White House they regard as their due. Enough media moguls and major figures in journalism owe the Clintons favors to mount quite an assault on The Anointed One -- perhaps enough to change eight to ten percent of the vote.
We won't know whether the timing is right until the election itself. But the Clintons' allegiants include some of the sharpest political analysts and operators in the game. Stay tuned!
Comments
Never thought I’d be saying this, but—Godspeed, Bill Clinton.
M
Posted by Mark Alger on 10/08/2008 at 09:23 AMFran, I dont think the Ayres connection is going to work; no one cares who Ayres is or what he did 35 years ago. What McCain has to do is tag Obama and the Democrats with what’s happening now. America and the world are facing a financial meltdown because the Democrats were less interested in regulating Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac than in using the two agencies to buy votes, and both of those agencies made sure that there would be no oversight of their dubious lending practices by making campaign contributions (bribes, by any other name, are still bribes)to lawmakers, especially, in order of magnitude of the contribution accepted, Chris Dodd, who was supposed to be providing oversight as head of the Banking Committee, and Barack Obama. McCain has to trumpet this every day from now until the election; the meltdown came about because Wall Street greed for pelf met the Democrats’ need to buy votes, and what the Democrats want now more than anything is for everyone to ignore their role in creating the disaster in the first place. Their friends in the media will not bring the matter up, but if the Clintonistas really want to shoot Obama down so that Hilary has a clear shot at 2012, then they’ve got to hit him with something relevant to people now, not recycled Weather Underground stuff. I just dont think anyone cares about this sort of thing nowadays, not with the economy heading for the tank at a prodigious clip.
Posted by Akaky on 10/08/2008 at 11:14 AM
