Obama staffer admits St. Obama has run a negative campaign. Change we can believe in?

[jackson_dem]

This is the different kind of politics St. Obama will usher in? Surely these must be lies. St. Obama is the first politician running for president ever to be losing at significant junctures and not use negative attacks. St. Obama has run a cleaner campaign than Mother Teresa would.

PHILADELPHIA—Barack Obama’s final push through Pennsylvania has shown the combative, angry side of a candidate and campaign that had once been defined by its good cheer and condemnation of negative tactics. Despite the trappings of cheeriness—old-timey whistle-stop train tour, frequent professions of “love” for supporters—Obama’s closing argument was a distinctly negative one, designed to give the state’s significant percentage of undecided voters an uneasy feeling about Clinton, who is the Tuesday primary’s favorite, and to start laying the groundwork for his criticism of Republican nominee John McCain.

At a number of well-attended public appearances, Obama depicted Clinton as a divisive, disingenuous Democratic agent of the Republican attack machine—a dishonest politician willing, in her desperation, to take the party down with her.

“Her basic argument is that the slash-and burn, say-anything, do-anything, special-interest-driven politics is how it works,” he said, speaking in front of a small train station with a rusted roof. “And so she has taken more money than any other candidate, Democrat or Republican combined. She also believes that the nature of politics is that you say what the people want to hear. So maybe you say something about trade when you are campaigning with your husband eight, ten, 12 years ago and you say something different now that you are out campaigning in Ohio, Pennsylvania. Maybe you say one thing about the war when it looks like the war is popular and maybe you say something else about the war when it gets to be unpopular.”

The Obama campaign says the nastier tack is a necessary one. According to one staffer, speaking on background, Obama needed to make clear the distinction between the candidates and hit Clinton on what the Obama campaign perceives as her greatest vulnerability: trustworthiness. Likewise, according to the staffer, a conference call with Bosnia veterans held by the Obama campaign was intended to raise the question of her credibility by “keeping in the bloodstream” her embarrassingly inaccurate portrayal of a 1996 visit to Bosnia, which she said had taken place under sniper fire.

http://www.observer.com/2008/obama-gets-nasty>link