After criticism about the ferocity and accuracy of attack ads against Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton‘s campaign pulled a harshly negative radio spot against her opponent Thursday, only to make a nearly identical charge Friday at a news conference. The move signaled Clinton’s intention to stay on the attack in her close battle against Obama for the Democratic nomination, despite making conciliatory gestures, political analysts said.
“Barack Obama is finding out what it’s like to cross the Clinton machine,” said University of California political science professor Larry Berman. “He’s getting the same treatment as a lot of people who happen to be Republican.”
On Thursday, the Clinton campaign put up a radio ad that painted Obama as a supporter of Republican policies, not Democratic ones.
Obama responded with an ad that said Clinton will “say anything and change nothing.”
After a barrage of criticism, Clinton took down her ad, and Obama pulled his.
On Friday, Clinton went on the morning talk show circuit and seemed to call for a truce. She told CBS “Early Show”‘s Harry Smith that “everybody needs to take a deep breath.”
But a few hours later, four members of the Clinton team went back on the attack during a 30-minute conference call with reporters.
Reopening an earlier line of criticism, Mike McCurry and Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., accused Obama of praising the Republican policies put in place by Ronald Reagan.
Obama last week told a Nevada newspaper that Reagan “changed the trajectory of America in a way that, you know, Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not.” He said the GOP was “the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time … in the sense they were challenging the conventional wisdom.”
Frank and Mark Penn, who is Clinton’s pollster and chief strategist, also questioned the Obama campaign’s claim that he never supported the Iraq war though he had voted in the Senate to approve $83 billion in supplemental war funding.
In an incongruous note toward the end of the call, Penn said there was a desire for both campaigns to “adjust their tones.”
Berman said Clinton’s attacks on Obama bring the risk of a backlash not only in the primaries, but also in the general election if she wins the nomination.
“If this continues to take the negative and dirty road, voters may very likely be turned off in the general election,” he said.
