Primary Dirt
10 August 2008 3:00 pm by Taylor Marsh
 |
Mike Allen
teases Josh Green. AdNags gets a bookend. Green continues his Clinton excavation, which began in 2006. So, strap yourselves in, because HRC supporters are going to relive the primary nightmare, while other Democrats will simply be infuriated at the never ending soap opera.
Shorter: Penn should have been fired long before he was. Via Politico’s Allen:
… The eight-page blockbuster, “The Front-Runner’s Fall,”
draws on internal memos, e-mails and meeting notes to reveal what the magazine’s
September issue calls “the backstabbing and conflicting strategies that
produced an epic meltdown.” …… Penn, the presidential campaign’s chief strategist, wrote in a memo to Clinton excerpted in the article: “I cannot imagine American electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values.” …
The Penn memo suggesting that the campaign target Obama’s “lack of American roots” said in part: “All of these articles about his boyhood in Indonesia and his life in Hawaii are geared towards showing his background is diverse, multicultural and putting that in a new light.
“Save it for 2050. … Every speech should contain the line you were born in the middle of America American to the middle class in the middle of the last century. And talk about the basic bargain as about the deeply American values you grew up with, learned as a child and that drive you today. Values of fairness, compassion, responsibility, giving back
“Let’s explicitly own ‘American’ in our programs, the speeches and the values. He doesn’t. Make this a new American Century, the American Strategic Energy Fund. Let’s use our logo to make some flags we can give out. Let’s add flag symbols to the backgrounds.”
These nasty Penn nuggets could have come straight from the anti Obama blogs so popular
now among the unhinged fringe… or a Republican, though there’s not much difference these days.
The “American” aspect of Penn’s campaign was first reported in The New York Times in early June.
Backed by Bill Clinton, Mr. Penn pushed for aggressive attacks on Mr. Obama, something other advisers resisted. At one point, Mr. Penn argued that Mrs. Clinton should find subtle ways to exploit what he called Mr. Obama’s “lack of American roots,” referring to his Kenyan father and his childhood years in Indonesia and even the offshore state of Hawaii, the campaign officials said. Mr. Penn recommended that Mrs. Clinton own the word “American” — she should talk about the “American century” and her “American Strategic Energy Fund,” and so forth. She should add flag symbols to her logo, he suggested.
No doubt the Clinton hating Obama blogs will cluck, cluck, cluck with satisfaction
over this one. Seen as validation, the internal
memos hinted at in Allen’s piece and dished about recently, the subject
of which has been whispered about among political junkies for months, will also likely
spur people on to asking more about Hillary’s campaign and what, exactly, went wrong and who’s to blame. However, many will simply not write this tale until after November.
Most Democrats don’t want to do anything to distract from winning.
It took a while, almost a year after the Josh
Green’s GQ piece was spiked because the Clintons allegedly didn’t approve.
But from all accounts it looks like the reporter got a “blockbuster”
tale of Hillary’s presidential campaign that everyone has been dying to get. Dishing the dirt on Democrats lately has become the favorite summertime sport.
