The Washington Times (a newspaper that can’t be accused of being a left-wing rag) reports that the campaign of presumptive Republican Presidential nominee Sen. John McCain is recycling Hillary Clinton Democratic primary Obama attack lines, bigtime:
Democrats now want to move past the nasty fight and Clinton backers are standing by Mr. Obama’s side, but Republicans aren’t eager to let the opposing party forget its warring.
“We could point to many, many examples during the debates where the words ‘irresponsible’ and ‘naive’ were applied to Senator Obama, but not by a Republican, but by Hillary Clinton. She’ll probably be in a different position now, but these are issues that Hillary Clinton very dramatically pointed out during the Democratic primary,” former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani told reporters Wednesday. The former Republican presidential candidate was using Mrs. Clinton’s line to go after Mr. Obama after the Democrat’s formation of a national security “working group” to advise him on the issue.
And the rhetorical re-runs go back several months, to controversies that seemed to have begun to peter out:
In a press conference this week, Mr. McCain of Arizona employed another familiar line against Mr. Obama – evoking his rival’s remarks this spring that some rural voters are “bitter” and “cling” to religion and guns. Mrs. Clinton labeled the comments “elitist,” and repeatedly went after Mr. Obama as having insulted voters.
“I won’t tell [the American people] that in small towns across America and Pennsylvania that they are bitter or angry about their economic conditions,” he said, adding that he knows why gun enthusiasts “embrace their constitutional rights … [and churchgoers] embrace their religion because they’re fundamentally good and decent people.”
The McCain slam could have been culled from Mrs. Clinton’s own attack in April when the “bitter” comments were first reported and she said it seemed Mr. Obama was blaming rural voters for opposing him.
If this keeps up, any day now McCain will announce: “I’m ready to be President on day one..,” wearing a brown pants suit.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.