The Politico has yet another story that is clearly-sourced from within the Clinton campaign complaining about how Obama treated the Clintons. This is truly something of a first – where a party is settling on a nominee who is days within giving his acceptance speech and complaints are coming from one side. Even the section about sourcing from people who have relations with the Obama and Clinton sides underscore a fact: there are people connected to the Clinton side who want to keep the seemingly non-ending and ongoing Clinton psychodrama going. And it won’t benefit their party.
It’s filled with indications that the sources are a) from the Clinton camp b) people who say they are close to the Clinton camp. And the laundry list of negative feelings and analysis about Obama in it won’t help the Democratic Party’s attempt to launch Obama, his candidacy and a unified party ready to battle a tough election against a party that will be on-message from second one during its convention.
You get the feelings that (1) the Clintons are trying to sandbag Obama’s chances by use of signals but aiming for plausible deniability OR (2) the Clintons have and their close advisers have lost their political savvy because, with polls and news stories such as this, an Obama loss will rightfully or wrongfully be blamed by a segment of the Democratic Party on the Clintons…who are leaving a Google-able trail through stories such as this…a trail that some will point to in 2012.
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.