Obama campaign
Posted at 10:19pm on May 12, 2008 Open Season on Obama Advisers
Watch Your Own Backs, You’ve Got no Support from the Top
By Mark I
Moe Lane points to a Jake Tapper Piece detailing the numerous times Sen. Barack Obama has placed blame on his advisers for his radical policy positions. Less noticed is the growing tendency for Obama to drop those advisers like hot rocks the minute that their comments explaining Obama’s positions become known.
It all started with the case of Austan Goolsbee, the University of Chicago professor and Obama economics adviser who was caught telling Canadian officials, no doubt in English and French, that Sen. Obama didn’t really think that NAFTA needed to be renegotiated. It was all just campaign rhetoric, Goolsbee helpfully explained. The following week, Samantha Power, Harvard professor (Obama apparently collects university professors) and Obama campaign foreign policy adviser told the BBC that Obama had no intention of following the plan he had campaigned on for close to a year for getting U.S. troops out of Iraq. “He will, of course, not rely on some plan that he’s crafted as a presidential candidate or a U.S. Senator,” she said. But of course; and pardon me, but would you have any Grey Poupon?
Power resigned from the campaign, allegedly because in the same interview she referred to Sen. Hillary!™ Clinton as a “monster.” But Clinton’s negatives are so high that it would have been hard for most of America to find fault with that statement. No, the more damaging comments, and the ones she was kicked to the curb over, were the ones that exposed Obama’s real position on Iraq, and exposed him as a typical politician saying one thing to get elected while planning to do something else entirely.
Last week, another Obama adviser was unceremoniously dismissed for doing his job. Only this time, Sen. John McCain’s campaign deserves credit for forcing Obama to reduce his adviser corps by one. McCain pushed back hard on the question of Obama’s relationship with the Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, and forced Obama’s hand. The incident further revealed the thin-skinned nature of the Obama campaign, and provided a model that McCain should follow for the remainder of the election.
Read on…
