"Is Obama A Bully?" “He has got a killer instinct, but he has a cool anger" Call the Waaaambulance!

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Wed Jun-18-08 02:14 PM
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"Is Obama A Bully?" “He has got a killer instinct, but he has a cool anger" Call the Waaaambulance!

Edited on Wed Jun-18-08 02:28 PM by Pirate Smile

:evilgrin:

Is Obama A Bully? McCain Crew Says He Plays Age Card
Fiorina: ‘Deliberate Use’ Kerry: He’s Watched and Learned from ’00, ’04

by Jason Horowitz | June 17, 2008

“What they did in the primary was they mastered the art of the elliptical attack,” said one former staffer to Hillary Clinton, talking about the Obama campaign. “They are not the virginal angels they presented themselves as.”
On this point, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign staff and that of Republican nominee John McCain will find themselves in total agreement.

In the weeks since Barack Obama effectively wrapped up the Democratic nomination, he and his campaign have savaged their Republican counterparts, pouncing on errors great and small and drawing attention to a pattern of “confused” remarks by Mr. McCain, who the Obama campaign has accused of “dusting off the tired, old, worn-out ideas of George Bush.” They have, in that time, successfully hounded the McCain campaign into cutting loose several top aides; incessantly used a careful selection of Mr. McCain’s words to raise doubts both about his understanding of economics and his concern for the welfare of U.S. soldiers in Iraq; and, perhaps most insulting of all, laughed off the Arizona senator’s offer to engage in a series of town-hall-style joint appearances with Mr. Obama.

Add to their aggressive tactics an enormous financial advantage, a favorable political climate and lots of adrenaline pumping after an unexpected primary victory, and one remarkable thing becomes clear: This year, it’s the Democrat who’s shaping up to be the bully.
“It feels great,” said Simon Rosenberg, the president of the New Democrat Network who was a young staffer in Bill Clinton’s famed 1992 war room. “Look—the Democrats have basically been without a strong single leader since early 1998.”

Chris Lehane, one of the Democratic Party’s fiercest operatives, who worked in the Clinton White House and left John Kerry’s campaign, reportedly, because it wasn’t aggressive enough, said he saw “parallels” between Clinton’s war room and the Obama campaign.
Both, he said, believed “that if you got into a knife fight in a telephone booth, you made sure you brought a gun.” (On June 13 in Philadelphia, Mr. Obama had said much the same thing: “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.”)

Mr. Lehane said that the idea of the Obama campaign, as was the case with Mrs. Clinton’s primary campaign, was to brand him “as a different kind of Democrat—a Democrat who was playing to win.”
In this, Mr. Obama also has the advantage—to the obvious annoyance of the McCain campaign—of a reputation for gentleness that allows him to avoid paying the public costs of running a bare-knuckles campaign. It is, simply put, difficult for people to reconcile his appearance with some of the things that are done in his name.
“He has got a killer instinct, but he has a cool anger, not a hot anger,” said Michael Bauer, a Chicago-based bundler for Mr. Obama. “It’s a real grit, not an issue of ripping someone’s face off. It’s ‘this is what we are going to do,’ and then getting it done.”

-snip-
But it seems, somehow, to have taken the McCain campaign off guard, and their aggrieved response, much like Mrs. Clinton’s throughout the heated Democratic nomination fight, is to accuse Mr. Obama of hypocrisy.

-snip-
Mr. Lehane, the Democratic operative, pronounced himself delighted that the McCain campaign was feeling victimized.
“When you are crying foul in a presidential campaign,” he said, “it usually means you are losing.”

http://www.observer.com/2008/obama-bully-mccain-crew-says-he-plays-age-card?page=0%2C0

I'm not a big Lehane fan but I still enjoyed this.