Obama's Politically Convenient Outrage

First off let me be perfectly clear, I don’t like attacks on candidate’s families and spouses. That being said, Senator Obama’s remarks in defense of his wife are pure political opportunism. Most of the criticisms of Michelle Obama are based on things she said on the campaign trail. You can’t have it both ways, statements made on the trail are open to critique. Phil Graham says something stupid he gets criticized, same goes for Michelle Obama. She made some comments that people were truly offended by, and the ensuing criticism is what happens when surrogates mess up.

Second, Senator Obama specifically mentioned Sean Hannity in his criticism. This has nothing to do with criticism of his wife; this has to do with Sean Hannity clearly articulating the numerous problems with Obama’s candidacy. McCain supporters weren’t thrilled when Hannity criticized McCain as the Republican nominee, and Obama supporters aren’t thrilled that he routinely points out Senator Obama’s radical associations. However, he’s not a name-caller. His criticisms aren’t below the belt; they are that of a conservative. If Senator Obama could find one instance of Sean Hannity calling his wife names, or treating her in a derogatory manner then I’ll take back my criticism and apologize.

Finally, what makes Senator Obama’s complaints so decisively political is his blanket condemnation of the McCain campaign and conservatives in general.

“SENATOR OBAMA: I wouldn't say the McCain campaign itself, but I would say that the apparatus of conservative columnists, blogs and the like. Talk shows, talk radio....When you see in the span of two or three or four weeks essentially the same talking points being used on a whole variety of shows or a whole variety of columns, over and over again....Hillary Clinton was subject to this, others have been subject to this in the past...It is part of our political environment that I'd like to change.”

First off, nice touch bringing Senator Clinton into this, but I didn’t hear any of this outrage when Senator Obama’s buddy Pastor Pfleger called Clinton a white supremist. In fact Senator McCain came to Clinton’s defense and Senator Obama didn’t bother. Second, is Senator Obama really going to make the argument that nasty bloggers, columnists, and personalities are only on the right? I know that plays well into the current political atmosphere where everything conservative is considered evil, but Senator Obama knows this is bunk. Every few weeks, a left wing blogger has to be told to stop making fun of the way Senator McCain’s teeth look, because his dental problems were a result of torture. It only takes a few moments to look through blogs to find accusations that Senator McCain is a war criminal because he was a fighter pilot in Vietnam. The Politico article Who’s smearing Whom shows that Obama surrogates have made numerous derogatory remarks about Senator McCain’s service. While at the same time Obama claims ‘The Smears are Coming! The Smears are Coming!’ citing that eventually he will be victim of ‘the Republican attack machine’ and 527’s. Yet the McCain campaign has been vigilant in not allowing any questionable campaigning to occur in their camp.

Obviously this is good campaigning by team hope. No one is going to challenge Obama for defending his wife. The problem is that this is another case of misrepresentation. Group all Republicans and conservatives into one group with George Bush and Karl Rove and declare them all evil. Forget that the party nominated its most un-Bush-like candidate, and just stereotype all those people as the same and forget about the truth.

Obama Surrogate's Smear While Obama Cries Foul

Recent political debate has revolved around the question of whether General Clark's comments about Senator McCain were a greater part offense or greater part idiotic. In the Politico article Who's Smearing Whom they call Senator Obama on his surregates string of oddly similar attacks on McCain's military service. Also noting that the Obama campaign has routinely cried 'smear' or 'about to smear' with no evidence that either the McCain campaign or the Republican party has any intention of playing dirty. The question is; were Wesley Clark's criticism so rediculous and ham-handed that people will start recognizing this pattern of unseamly attacks as more than just a coincidence?

Contrast the absence of smears from the McCain camp with some of the outlandish remarks made by high-ranking Obama supporters. In April, West Virginia Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV said that because McCain “was a fighter pilot, who dropped laser-guided missiles from 35,000 feet,” and “was long gone when they hit,” the Arizona senator who spent five and a half years in a Vietcong tiger cage having his arms repeatedly broken didn’t really understand the carnage of war. “What happened when [the missiles] get to the ground?” Rockefeller asked a crowd at an Obama rally. “He doesn’t know. You have to care about the lives of people. McCain never gets into those issues.” That the great-grandson of John D. Rockefeller would impugn the wartime experience of John McCain is especially rich, given that the only “battle” Rockefeller has seen is when he hunts wild game at his 80-acre ranch in Jackson Hole, Wyo.

Rockefeller’s smear was the first salvo in a pattern of attacks meant to insinuate that McCain’s Vietnam experience not only shouldn’t count as meaningful “experience,” but rendered him psychologically unfit for presidential office. In May, Iowa Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin said of McCain, “Everything is looked at from his life experiences, from always having been in the military, and I think that can be pretty dangerous.” Over the weekend, retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark said that McCain is “untested and untried,” and elaborated that, “I don't think getting in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to become president.” Clark, you may remember, ran for president in 2004 on his record as a career military officer, so his comment, which he has not retracted, was not just morally offensive but self-discrediting.

The smears didn’t stop there. On Monday, Obama foreign policy adviser Rand Beers unfavorably compared McCain’s POW experience with “the members of the Senate who were in the ground forces or who were ashore in Vietnam,” and who “have a very different view of Vietnam and the cost ... than John McCain does because he was in isolation essentially for many of those years and did not experience the turmoil here or the challenges that were involved for those of us who served in Vietnam during the Vietnam War.”

It’s curious how anyone could argue that a man with such visceral understanding of the capacity for what America’s enemies will do to our men and women in uniform doesn’t fully appreciate the cost of war. But even more troubling is the unmistakable pattern of these smears, all of them unsubtly alleging that McCain is an unhinged, mentally unstable warmonger who would deploy soldiers capriciously because he hasn’t truly experienced the horrors of ground battle. Indeed, the claims of these four men — and the short period of time in which they were all uttered — are so similar in tone that one would be foolish not to at least consider the possibility they were coordinated by the Obama campaign.