They’re All to Blame
Since I think that Obama and Clinton’s surrogates using Bhutto’s assassination as an “in” to discuss their respective foreign policies is OK, I didn’t have the same “WHAT? politics in a political campaign?!” reaction that Dana Goldstein and Adele Stan had, they’re leaving out a huge part of the story in their celebration of Clinton “hitting the right note” and her “mature statesmanship.”
While Clinton herself didn’t “politicize” the Bhutto assassination (not that there would have been anything wrong with that), Evan Bayh said that “When there are unfortunate calamities like this, the Republicans [will say], ‘See. See what we told you? We have to have someone who’s strong to defend America at a time of concern.’ Well, Senator Clinton is strong.” While Axelrod used the assassination to denigrate Clinton while Bayh used it to promote her, this is a distinction without a difference. If anyone actually changes their mind about Clinton or Obama based on their surrogates using a news-peg to promote their candidate…well, I’ll just say that’s not how I evaluate candidates.
PS – Everyone should thank TAPPED for the early New Year’s gift of getting Sam Rosenfeld to blog for them again.
