NYT: The Low Road to Victory — torn right from Karl Rove’s playbook

[RedEarth]

The Pennsylvania campaign, which produced yet another inconclusive result on Tuesday, was even meaner, more vacuous, more desperate, and more filled with pandering than the mean, vacuous, desperate, pander-filled contests that preceded it.


Voters are getting tired of it; it is demeaning the political process; and it does not work. It is past time for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to acknowledge that the negativity, for which she is mostly responsible, does nothing but harm to her, her opponent, her party and the 2008 election.

If nothing else, self interest should push her in that direction. Mrs. Clinton did not get the big win in Pennsylvania that she needed to challenge the calculus of the Democratic race. It is true that Senator Barack Obama outspent her 2-to-1. But Mrs. Clinton and her advisers should mainly blame themselves, because, as the political operatives say, they went heavily negative and ended up squandering a good part of what was once a 20-point lead.

On the eve of this crucial primary, Mrs. Clinton became the first Democratic candidate to wave the bloody shirt of 9/11. A Clinton television ad — torn right from Karl Rove’s playbook — evoked the 1929 stock market crash, Pearl Harbor, the Cuban missile crisis, the cold war and the 9/11 attacks, complete with video of Osama bin Laden. “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen,” the narrator intoned.

If that was supposed to bolster Mrs. Clinton’s argument that she is the better prepared to be president in a dangerous world, she sent the opposite message on Tuesday morning by declaring in an interview on ABC News that if Iran attacked Israel while she were president: “We would be able to totally obliterate them.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/opinion/23wed1.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

[MUAD_DIB]

1. “We would be able to totally obliterate them.”

I was hoping for more of a measured Kennedy-style Cuban Missile crisis response with regard to Iran.

"If the theocratic regime of Iran so happens to attack our ally, Israel, with either conventional or non-conventional weapons; America will respond in kind with overwhelming response to ensure the protection of Israel and the cessation of any further hostile threat from Iran."

The thing that really bothers me is that we are talking about a hypothetical attack of Israel by Iran. Why bother talking about it in those terms? It just sounds bad.

If Obama has done or said anything like this then t is just as bad.