Barack Obama is hoping that the people in Iowa don’t look at the two conflicting messages he is putting out and start wondering what kind of person he is. On the one hand, you have a person who is out there delivering this pretty speech on hope and political change. On the other, he is a person who has a 527 group out there called Vote Hope, http://www.votehope2008.com that is running ads in his favor even though he is not in favor of 527 ads.
So far, that is fine and understandable because a candidate cannot control what independent groups like 527s do, but then he is out there criticizing Hillary Clinton and John Edwards for having 527 groups running ads in their favor. Edwards has also asked 527 groups not to run ads on his behalf.
A week ago, according to this article in the Los Angeles Times, http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-dems23dec23,1,4586681.story?track=rss Obama and his chief strategist issued this pointed attack on Edwards:
"You can't say yesterday you don't believe in them, and today you have three-quarters of a million dollars being spent for you," Obama said… David Axelrod, Obama's chief strategist, said the 527 group known as Alliance for a New America just bought $756,000 worth of airtime to run ads in Iowa from Wednesday to Jan. 3, the date of the caucuses
Yesterday, the Washington Post’s Chris Cilliza wrote this article, http://blog.washingtonpost.com/thefix/2007/12/obama_and_outside_money.html , which discusses an Obama campaign memo to the press that has more attacks on Edwards regarding 527s and has attacks on Hillary Clinton for her 527 groups.
Neither Obama nor Axelrod or anyone else in the Obama campaign has mentioned the 527 group Vote Hope raising and spending money on Obama’s behalf. I wonder how Iowans would feel if they knew about that. I look at it and say, this person is not only not interested in political change; he is embracing the worst of the worst in contemporary political campaign hypocrisy and rhetoric.
Obama flubbed the initial response to the Bhutto Assassination raising questions on Presidential Readiness
The initial knock on Obama was that he didn’t have enough foreign policy experience to be President. Hillary Clinton made a particularly telling blow earlier on in the campaign when she referred to Obama as being naïve after he made an embarrassing comment on an international issue. If you have that perception out there, the last thing you want to do is confirm the naïve perception again but that is exactly what happened with Obama’s initial response to the assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.
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