By Brendan Loy
What can one say about this?
(Here's the Drudge page where it came from. More here.)
Although I probably shouldn't, I'll give Hillary the benefit of the doubt, for the moment, and assume the photo was leaked by low-level staffers with no authorization -- not even of the wink-wink, nudge-nudge kind -- from Hillaryland Central. Of course, to maintain that benefit, she'll need to step forward forthwith and angrily condemn this disgusting, unworthy smear tactic in no uncertain terms. No caveats, no defensiveness, no twisting this into some sort of talking point: just a straightforward, genuine condemnation.
Even if she does that, though, there is simply no way to undo the damage the photo will do -- both to Obama (among general-election voters who are inclined to lend credence to the Muslim Manchurian Candidate nonsense) and to Clinton. In the context of the Democratic nomination fight, this is deeply, deeply damaging to her, regardless of her personal culpability (or lack thereof), because nobody in the media -- and very few in the party, outside of her most loyal die-hards -- will give her the same benefit of the doubt that I'm tentatively extending. After all, the logic will go, leak-and-condemn is precisely what she'd do if this was a deliberate ploy. Even a full-throated condemnation can't unring the bell. So, no matter what she says, practically everyone will see this as yet another dirty Clinton tactic, orchestrated or at least acquiesced to from the top of the campaign. That's the price she pays for a) having a do-anything-to-win reputation, and b) behaving in ways that amplify that reputation.
I think, in fact, this may be the straw that breaks the camel's back for Hillary (no pun intended). I wouldn't be at all surprised if a whole bunch of superdelegates defect to Obama's camp in the next 48 hours, and the pressure on Hillary to "drop out for the good of the party" rachets up much sooner than expected. If this is going to be what the final week before Texas and Ohio looks like, every Democrat outside of the most loyal Clintonistas are going to want this campaign over, now.
UPDATE: On the other hand... Marc Ambinder points out that the only evidence the photo actually came from Hillary's camp is, well, Matt Drudge's assertion that it does. Ambinder writes:
It's unclear who is circulating the photo, what the photo means, why only Matt Drudge would receive it, why anyone would assume that even "stressed" Clinton staffers would do such a thing, and why, absent any proof that such a photo was circulating, Obama's campaign would formally react.
(Clinton campaign aides denied circulating the photo, although they worry that, if someone on the campaign -- 700 people now -- did so without authorization, they will be in a pickle.)
We're at the stage of the campaign where both campaigns lose perspective and are willing to believe the absolute worst about each other on the basis of an assertion. And that Manichean perspective then cause said campaign to imputing the absolute worst motivations to their opponents. ...
Anyway, the Clinton campaign believes that the Obama campaign is cynically exploiting the Drudge fetish that news producers have in order to step on her big foreign policy speech today, and the Obama campaign believes that the Clinton campaign is actually sending out a funny-looking photo of Obama.
Such charges are aided and abetted by stories like this one, which uncritically accepts the premise of the photo and its origin.
Could some dumb Clinton ally have sent the photo to Matt Drudge? Sure. Does that mean the campaign authorized its sending? Why would Matt Drudge be the recipient of such an oppo dump -- whatever the oppo dump was supposed to signify.
It'll be interesting to see how this story develops. My above commentary is obviously premised on the notion that the photo did come from someone in the Clinton camp (or at least that the media continues to "uncritically accept" that assertion as fact).
UPDATE 2: Benefit of the doubt extinguished.
Obviously, if this wasn't coming from them, they'd deny it. (As Josh Marshall says, "Put it all together and the Clinton camp would appear to be unwilling to make even the most perfunctory denial that they are or were circulating this photo around. We held up on [discussing] this [story] because we never want to take Drudge as a fact witness for anything. But I think the Clinton camp's statement speaks for itself.")
Instead, the Clinton camp did exactly what I said they shouldn't do, reacting with defensiveness and twisting this into an anti-Obama talking point. And it's the most cynical talking point you can possibly imagine. From Hillary's campaign manager:
If Barack Obama's campaign wants to suggest that a photo of him wearing traditional Somali clothing is divisive, they should be ashamed. Hillary Clinton has worn the traditional clothing of countries she has visited and had those photos published widely.
This is nothing more than an obvious and transparent attempt to distract from the serious issues confronting our country today and to attempt to create the very divisions they claim to decry.
The message, in essence, is that Obama is being anti-Muslim for daring to suggest that it's divisive to circulate a photo that's obviously deliberately designed to feed the bigoted anti-Muslim rumor that he's some sort of terrorist Manchurian Candidate. So basically, Clinton's people can play the Muslim Card to maximum advantage, and then call Obama an anti-Muslim bigot for objecting to their tactics.
F*** Hillary Clinton. F*** her and f*** her whole cynical, divisive, disgusting campaign. May she return to the Senate in shame, get caught in some sort of horrible scandal, and be defeated in the 2012 Senate race.
P.S. From the previously skeptical Marc Ambinder: "OK -- so someone (connected to the Clinton campaign?) circulated the photo because they wanted to show everyone how cool Obama looked in it... and the Obama campaign, for questioning the motive of the person who distributed it, is being offensive?"
P.P.S. Note that, just this morning (before I knew about the photo), I was saying, "I don't think it's fair to put the 'Muslim Manchurian Candidate' thing on Hillary."
Oh, but how quickly and thoroughly she has proved me wrong.
If Clinton's campaign really wanted to avoid being "distract[ed] from the serious issues confronting our country today," they would have promptly put out a statement like this:
Senator Obama and I disagree on a number of things, but we are in complete agreement that religion and ethnicity should not be used as a wedge issue to divide us. Obviously, there is nothing wrong with wearing the traditional garb of another nation while visiting there. Just as obviously, the person who circulated this photo is trying to suggest otherwise. We do not yet know whether the photo was circulated by anyone working for our campaign; if it was, it was obviously unauthorized, and we abhor it. If we discover that anyone on this campaign was employing such a cynical tactic, that person will no longer be working for this campaign. I know that Senator Obama and I both share a desire to make this contest about the issues, not about race or gender or ethnicity or religion, and I hope we can return to that important and substantive debate.
But they don't want to avoid distraction. They want to turn this to their advantage. They will, I think, fail. But it's telling that their first instinct is to attack, no matter how cynical or wrong-headed or mutually destructive their line of attack may be.
UPDATE: Now the Clinton campaign has come out -- finally -- with a quasi-denial. They say the e-mail wasn't "officially" pushed by the campaign. Well, of course not. Things like this are never "official." Cue Josh Marshall:
When we first heard about this brouhaha this morning, we didn't want to do anything with it before we heard what the Clinton camp had to say, for the reasons I described in the initial post ["we never want to take Drudge as a fact witness for anything"]. We know that without doing some sort of exhaustive internal investigation, there's no way a national campaign can say that no one in their campaign had anything to do with it. There's high-level staff, mid-level, hundreds of volunteers, etc. That's not what we were looking for. In most cases, in a situation like this, a campaign, or in this case, say, perhaps Howard Wolfson or some other top level staff would say: "We don't condone this. We didn't authorize this. As far as we know no one in our organization had anything to do with this. Our campaign is made up of hundreds of people. So we can't say definitively that someone somewhere didn't make a stupid decision. But this isn't something the campaign has anything to do with." We pushed and pushed. But we didn't get anything like that. The new statement goes further [than earlier non-denials]. But not that much. The Clinton campaign is either terribly inept at dealing with the story or they know or suspect that it's accurate.
