Obama’s Campaign Uses Bill Clinton Campaigning For Funds Appeal

The war between the camps of Senator Barack Obama and the Billary campaign of Senator Hillary Clinton and the person who is emerging as her Campaigner In Chief, former President Bill Clinton, is heating up. BIG-TIME.

The Clinton campaign has started to make some in the Democratic Party uneasy about the unfettered co-campaign of Bill Clinton, a figure long-beloved throughout the Democratic Party — a one-time party unifier who now seems to be slicing a bloody party split.

UPDATE: Bill Clinton’s campaigning has now been soundly-condemned by his former Labor Secretary, Robert Reich, in a post titled Bill Clinton’s Old Politics. Excerpts are at the bottom of this post.

UPDATE II: Obama says the party will unite no matter what when this is over. Details at the bottom of this post.

And then there was the controversial ad: the Clinton campaign ran an ad widely-condemned as having information in it that had been proven inaccurate — but now it has pulled it.

Meanwhile, the Clintons’ campaign to telegraph to voters the fact that Obama is not a saint apparently has generated enough backlash that the Obama campaign has now put out a fund raising email (under the name of his spouse Michelle Obama) specifically using Bill Clinton’s controversial comments as an argument to contribute to Obama’s campaign.

Does it matter if the Clinton camp pulled the ad? Not really.

Once a negative ad is out (a) the message gets out (b) if the ad is controversial, it generates lots of news, blog and talk radio controversy and gets free publicity (c) the pulling is a news story but not everyone reads the news story about it being pulled — so the negative imagery lingers. Fox News:

Hillary Clinton’s campaign on Thursday pulled a controversial ad about rival Barack Obama that has been panned by several independent observers and called inaccurate by the Obama camp.

The ad, which was running on South Carolina radio ahead of Saturday’s Democratic presidential primary there, featured Obama’s recent comments about the GOP in which he said that the Republicans were “the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time.”

Really?” the narrator says in the ad. “Aren’t those the ideas that got us into the economic mess we’re in today?”

Obama made the remarks in an interview last week with the Reno Gazette-Journal editorial board before the Nevada caucuses, and they have since become fodder both for Clinton and rival John Edwards.

The ad “straightforwardly uses Senator Obama’s own words in his own voice saying the Republican Party was the party of ideas for the past 15-20 years,” said Clinton spokesman Zac Wright.

But Obama has repeatedly stated that the comments he made described the prominence of Republican ideas under Ronald Reagan, not an endorsement of them. In fact, he says he disagreed with many of those ideas, and they were only noteworthy because they challenged “conventional wisdom.”

NOTE: What’s most interesting about this brou-ha-ha is that many Democrats correctly decried and denounced this kind of campaigning when Republicans did it, or if Karl Rove & Co misrepresented Democrats’ positions or declarations on the war and national security.

In fact, a BIG CHUNK of the opposition to the war rests on the now-documented fact that Bush administration made assertions that were known to be incorrect.

But now, in a Democratic primary, essentially the same tactics (correctly noted by a politician to have been derived from the late Republican political operative Lee Atwater, who worked for the first George Bush) are being used in a Democratic primary. But many who bitterly complained about the use of these tactics when used by GOPers, don’t now. It OK because THEIR SIDE is using it.

So, of course, we assume, there will be no complaints in November when the GOP political offensive team revs up and goes after the nominee — since these are acceptable tactics. (And if you believe that I’ll sell you this for $200 in cash.)

More from Fox:

An editorial in The Washington Post Thursday also criticized Clinton’s ad, saying it was a “distortion.” The editorial added that Obama’s assessment of the influence of the Republican Party under Ronald Reagan is accurate, and that “there is nothing in the record that suggests that Mr. Obama supports any of those positions.”

Now, Obama’s campaign, apparently having gotten feedback about how the Billary campaign is playing with at least part of the party (that will be needed to support Mrs. Clinton if she wins the nomination) has put out this fund-raising letter:

Friend —

In the past week or two, another candidate’s spouse has been getting an awful lot of attention.

We knew getting into this race that Barack would be competing with Senator Clinton and President Clinton at the same time.

We expected that Bill Clinton would tout his record from the nineties and talk about Hillary’s role in his past success. That’s a fair approach and a challenge we are prepared to face.

What we didn’t expect, at least not from our fellow Democrats, are the win-at-all-costs tactics we’ve seen recently. We didn’t expect misleading accusations that willfully distort Barack’s record.

Barack Obama isn’t relying on a former President of the United States to campaign for him.

He’s relying on us — you, me, and hundreds of thousands of people like us who are giving whatever they can afford to support this movement.

Please stand up in the face of these new attacks. Make your first online donation of $50 today and own a piece of this campaign. [Editor's note: We are omitting the link since we don't advertise party fundraisers on this site in our posts .]

Barack’s unwavering opposition to the war in Iraq, his outspoken support of women’s rights, and his call for leadership that will transform our party and our country have all been mischaracterized in the past two weeks.

We’ve seen disingenuous attacks and smear tactics turn people off from the political process for too long, and enough is enough.

It’s time for a change. It’s time for a new kind of leadership and a new kind of politics in our party and in our country.

And while Senator Clinton has a former president in her corner, I’ll put my faith in a movement of a whole lot of people who are ready for change.

South Carolina votes in 48 hours, and more than 20 states will make their voices heard in less than two weeks on February 5th. Now is the time for all of us to step up and take personal responsibility for making change happen.

Please make your first online donation of $50 now.

If the Obama camp felt the former Senator’s virtual third-term campaign against him was playing well among all Democrats, they never would have put the letter out.

Andrew Sullivan, who favors Obama and McCain, now sees this now sees this as a campaign about dynastic politics:

What they [the Clintons] convey is simple competence and practicality. And they are definitely, wittingly or not, appealing to a more primitive style of dynastic politics, more associated with places like Pakistan and Argentina than the US. They figured that this was all they’d need. It’s their party, after all.

The Obama phenomenon rattled them, and their strategy is to quash it, by any means and at any cost. They know that they do not need to win so much as they need to make Obama lose. That’s the game-plan. The same emailers seemed unusually convinced that Obama was a closet Muslim and that a black man could never be elected in America. The most depressing tendencies from the right and from the left.

The more I witness this campaign, the clearer it is to me that it is not only important that Obama and McCain now win; it is a moral and political imperative that the Clintons lose.

Not all Democrats will agree with Sullivan on the part about McCain (although many independent voters apparently do).

But, increasingly, the Clinton’s big problem now will be that, if they pull out all stops not to sell Democrats on WHAT THEY CAN BRING TO THE TABLE but seemingly saying and doing whatever it takes (even running ads with info that has proven to be false and they later have to pull), they may find that a segment of the Democratic Party will decide they don’t want to sit at the table with them and stay home.

They’ll just stay in their rooms at home — during an election where many Republicans consider Mrs. Clinton the great GOP unifier.

UPDATE: On his blog, Bill Clinton’s Labor Secretary Robert Reich writes:

I write this more out of sadness than anger. Bill Clinton’s ill-tempered and ill-founded attacks on Barack Obama are doing no credit to the former President, his legacy, or his wife’s campaign. Nor are they helping the Democratic party. While it may be that all is fair in love, war, and politics, it’s not fair – indeed, it’s demeaning – for a former President to say things that are patently untrue (such as Obama’s anti-war position is a “fairy tale”) or to insinuate that Obama is injecting race into the race when the former President is himself doing it.

Meanwhile, the attack ads being run in South Carolina by the Clinton camp which quote Obama as saying Republicans had all the ideas under Reagan, is disingenuous. For years, Bill Clinton and many other leading Democrats have made precisely the same point – that starting in the Reagan administration, Republicans put forth a range of new ideas while the Democrats sat on their hands. Many of these ideas were wrong-headed and dangerous, such as supply-side economics. But for too long Democrats failed counter with new ideas of their own; they wrongly assumed that the old Democratic positions and visions would be enough.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE II: But Obama says the party will in the end unite — and not to blame Mrs. Clinton:

Even as he repeated complaints that Hillary and Bill Clinton are spreading falsehoods about his record, Barack Obama today dismissed suggestions that bad feelings from the Democratic primary campaign would hinder the party in the fall or depress turnout among African-Americans if Clinton is nominated.

“Black voters shouldn’t blame Senator Clinton for running a vigorous campaign against me,” Obama said during a press conference following a rally here. “That should be a source of pride. It means that I might win this thing.”

Obama added that he is “confident that the Democrats will rally together” for the campaign in November because the differences among the Democratic candidates “pale in comparison” to differences with Republicans.