Clinton dirty tactics used on Obama is used on Sanders

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The Guardian (January 21, 2008) Obama said he had been working in the slums of Chicago while Clinton "was a corporate lawyer sitting on the board of WalMart". Clinton retaliated that Obama had represented a slum landlord.

Obama repeatedly claimed he had been a victim of a campaign of dishonest tactics by the Clinton campaign over the past month. The audience booed Clinton when she said Obama never gave a straight answer.

Earlier Obama had gambled on a full-frontal challenge to the Democratic icon Bill Clinton, who has made a series of personal attacks on Obama on the campaign trail since December. Obama retaliated before the debate, describing the former president's behaviour as "troubling" and accusing him of distorting facts.

Clinton's status as the most popular figure in the party makes any public attack risky, though less so than it would have been a few weeks ago. The former president's derogatory and often tetchy remarks have alienated and angered many senior Democrats previously loyal to him, particularly African Americans.

In an interview with ABC television, Obama said: "The former president, who I think all of us have a lot of regard for, has taken his advocacy on behalf of his wife to a level that I think is pretty troubling. He continues to make statements that are not supported by the facts ... This has become a habit, and one of the things that we're going to have to do is to directly confront Bill Clinton when he's making statements that are not factually accurate."

Clinton in December said Obama's lack of experience would make his presidency "a roll of the dice". A few days before the New Hampshire primary on January 8, he described Obama's early opposition to the Iraq war as a "fairytale", a derogatory remark that has caused the most offence, and at the weekend Clinton accused the Obama team of using strong-arm tactics in the Nevada primary.

A source in the Clinton camp described Obama's decision to challenge Bill Clinton head-on as stemming from frustration over defeat in Nevada. The source described the attack as "bad politics, given that Bill remains extraordinarily popular in the party".

Newsweek reported that there was a heated exchange when Bill Clinton called Ted Kennedy, the Massachusetts senator and still one of the most influential figures in the party. Kennedy reportedly said that the former president bore some of the responsibility for making race an issue in the campaign.

Obama decided to go after Bill Clinton after talks with his campaign team. David Axelrod, Obama's communications director, said he did not think Clinton's comments were chance remarks.

Huffington Post (January 19, 2008) In the aftermath of the Pennsylvania Democratic primary, the racism and hypocrisy of the Clinton campaign were laid bare for all a nation to scorn. Desperate and willing to do anything to win, the Clintons resorted to a naked form of racism aimed directly at white working-class voters in the rural portions of the state. Their message: Barack Obama cannot win because he’s black.

In the early stages of the campaign, it was Clinton’s cadre who kept playing the race card. In New Hampshire, Clinton’s co-chair, Billy Shaheen, accused Obama of being a drug dealer; then there was the photograph of Sen. Barack Obama in Somali garb leaked to the press by Clinton’s staff.

In the aftermath of the South Carolina primary, former President Bill Clinton compared Obama’s victory to those of Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988. His message was clear: Obama was a marginal, black candidate.

To anyone who has followed the Clinton campaign closely, it is all too apparent that her top political strategists — reeling from losses from coast to coast and badly miscalculating the grassroots power of the Obama movement — made a tactical decision to go negative, as that would be the only way for Clinton to stop Obama and somehow allow her to steal the nomination.

In Pennsylvania, Gov. Ed Rendell, who headed up Clinton’s campaign, was publicly saying that white voters in the Keystone State would not vote for Obama because he was black. Rendell’s remarks were racist from the get-go, but no one in the white media called him on it. Indeed, the media began playing the game.

ABC’s George Stephanopoulos — who worked as Bill Clinton’s press secretary and lied through his teeth on Clinton’s behalf (where’s the journalistic “objectivity” here?) — brought up Obama’s relationship to former ‘60s radical Bill Ayers. And the rest of the media went bonkers over Obama’s all-too-honest remarks about conservative white voters hanging on to God and guns.

Clinton boldly linked Obama with Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and Wright with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. That linkage was patently racist at its core — yet, once again, no one in the mainstream media so much as blinked. In so doing, Clinton was echoing the views of Fox News’ resident racist Sean Hannity.

As anyone who has read the two major biographies of Hillary Clinton ... knows all too well, she will do whatever she has to do and say whatever she has to say in the unbridled (and unscrupulous) pursuit of power. 

Clinton is an inveterate liar — I am sorry, there is truly no other word for it ... personal deception is at the core of her personality, and of her career, and continues to reveal itself.

ABC News Flashback (April 27, 2012) On the eve of the 2008 Pennsylvania primary, Clinton's campaign released a television commercial featuring an image of bin Laden and invoking President Harry S. Truman's quote: "If you can't stand the heat get out of the kitchen."

The ad never mentioned Obama by name, but it was part of the Clinton campaign's effort to brand the Illinois Senator as inexperienced, especially in the foreign policy arena.

"Who do you think has what it takes?" the ad's narrator says as an image of Clinton flashes on the screen. (The ad showed a brief clip of bin Laden as well as images of Pearl Harbor, the 1920's stock market crash, Fidel Castro, the fall of the Berlin Wall). "You need to be ready for anything, especially now."

The Obama campaign spokesman, Bill Burton, accused the Clinton team of playing "the politics of fear" just like George W. Bush.

• Politico (January 11, 2016) Racial tensions roil Democratic race
• CNN (February 14, 2008) Clinton sharpens attacks on Obama