Should Clinton be Playing Nice?

What has struck me about the Democratic campaign for the nomination of the party for President is how nice it has been played. The politics have been downright nice. Whatever happened to politics being a game for the brave who were prepared to play dirty?

Obama said this just recently:


"You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not."


"And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."


He has since tried to explain this away in a number of different ways but never really retracted it! The closest he came was to suggest that he could have said it better...I don't know perhaps he could have said something along the lines of, I am not surprised that these gun-toting, God-loving, racist, isolationists small towners are bitter about their lives! Is Obama an elitist or are we reading too much into this?


I wonder how you spin this one. If Obama has learned anything from Clinton's super large embellishment of her so-called under live fire Bosnia moment is that perhaps it is better to say; Yep, stretched the truth on that one and get back to the business of campaigning. Clinton's mistake was to try and keep making the incident something it clearly wasn't once the video emerged.


People might still be sold on the "change" and the "hope" for new politics in Washington but it really is a hope against hope in the sense that there really needs to be desire for change from those in Washington. The only other way to get this change is to have a majority of new faces committed to being that change.


In any event Obama has been in the Senate long enough now for an evaluation of his record on policy...why is this so difficult to find in the mainstream media. Perhaps the charges laid by the Clinton campaign that Obama has generally had a free ride in the mainstream media is true!


In a general election it looks like it could get ugly, particularly so when the Republicans are likely to be playing for keeps. What looked like a certain Democratic victory is a whole lot less certain now if Obama does fall across the line for the victory. The Obama baggage is only just about to start getting rifled through and the vetting process may prove much more harmful to him than it would to Clinton. I lot of people must be wondering, super delegates included, how much more there is hiding in the Obama closet because the Clinton closet (including that of the former President) has been picked over for a long while like a vulture picking over a carcass.


American politics, always fun to watch!