By MICHAEL POWELL THE NEW YORK TIMES
Published: 02-27-08
Another Day Another Ditch
Every once in a while the Democratic primary campaign pitches into the most curious ditches. So much of Monday was spent talking behind the scenes and through surrogates about a sort of costume party.
First the Drudge Report released a photo of Barack Obama in a turban and attributed it to Clinton campaign sources. That drew an infuriated response from the Clinton campaign which endeavored to flip the matter on its head; it suggested that the Obama campaign was deriding ethnic dress by bridling at the publication of the photo.
Of course the campaign also did not deny playing any role in releasing that photo.
“Enough” said Maggie Williams the Clinton campaign manager. “If Barack Obama’s campaign wants to suggest that a photo of him wearing traditional Somali clothing is divisive they should be ashamed.”
The Obama campaign did not waste time responding sending out an e-mail dagger in the morning. Later in the day aides did not push the story but they were quite insistent that the Clinton campaign had a hand in it and not simply for the photograph’s picaresque quality.
“My hunch is that it was not intended in any way to enhance our candidacy” Robert Gibbs a top Obama campaign adviser said dryly.
Mr. Gibbs noted that in this Internet-24-hour-news-cycle age the photograph would inevitably go viral — that is it would appear everywhere not least on cable news stations. And that would lend credence to a false rumor that Mr. Obama is a Muslim. Mr. Obama is a Christian.
“Obviously if it lands on Drudge it becomes ubiquitous” said Mr. Gibbs a former legislative aide to Mr. Obama. “I’m superstitious but I don’t necessarily believe in political coincidence.”
The other long distance political fisticuffs Monday came over foreign policy.
Mrs. Clinton asserted that only she possesses the foreign policy experience needed to conduct foreign policy in a perilous age. She dismissed the idea that negotiating without preconditions with the nation’s enemies would work.
“With me this is not theoretical” she said.
Mr. Gibbs responded by posing a series of rather rhetorical questions: Why did she accept President Bush’s argument and vote for the Iraq war? And why has she given the president the benefit of the doubt on American policy toward Iraq and Afghanistan?
He noted that Mr. Obama had consistently opposed the war before and after he became a United States Senator.
“The only person who got those decisions right was Barack Obama” he said.
