Adviser told Hillary Clinton to attack Barack Obama on 'lack' of U.S. roots
BY THOMAS M. DeFRANK
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF
Monday, August 11th 2008,
nydailynews.com
WASHINGTON - Hillary Clinton was urged by her chief strategist to undermine Barack Obama as a quasi-American whose "lack of American roots" are outside the political mainstream.
According to an inside-the-bunker article being published in The Atlantic on Monday, key adviser Mark Penn ridiculed Obama's "boyhood in Indonesia and his life in Hawaii," arguing Obama's multicultural diversity could be exploited.
Penn, in a memo to Clinton, urged that "every speech should contain the line you were born in the middle of America" and include "the deeply American values you grew up with, learned as a child and that drive you today.
"Let's explicitly own 'American' in our programs, the speeches and the values. He doesn't. Make this a new American Century, the American Strategic Energy Fund. Let's use our logo to make some flags we can give out. Let's add flag symbols to the backgrounds."
Penn added, "I cannot imagine America electing a President during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values."
A summary of the magazine's postmortem on Clinton's collapse, headlined "The Front-Runner's Fall," was previewed by Politico.com Sunday.
Atlantic senior editor Joshua Green, who obtained numerous internal campaign e-mails and memos, writes that Clinton's once-supposedly impregnable campaign disintegrated into "epic meltdown" by backbiting, staff disarray and the candidate's indecision.
"The anger and toxic obsessions overwhelmed even the most reserved Beltway wise men," Green says. "Advisers couldn't execute strategy; they routinely attacked and undermined each other, and Clinton never forced a resolution ...never behaved like a chief executive, and her own staff proved to be her Achilles heel."
The internal chaos, personal jealousies and policy disputes of the Clinton campaign have been exhaustively documented in the past year as the candidate went from slam-dunk winner to an also-ran thumped by a junior senator from Illinois.
The Atlantic exposé fleshes out the anatomy of failure in dramatic and often unflattering detail. The candidate herself comes across as erratic and vacillating.
As a result, Green writes, major decisions would be stalled for weeks until Clinton "would erupt, driving her staff to panic and misfire."
Green concludes, "What is clear from the internal documents is that Clinton's loss derived not from any specific decision she made but rather from the preponderance of the many she did not make." |
