Looks like it. Kristol and Lieberman want you to believe Obama's a Marxist, and Hillary's newest ploy is to argue that Obama will be crucified by the GOP in the general when it starts exploiting his association with 70s radicals Wm. Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn.
We knew this kind of thing was coming. We knew that the entrenched powers and interests will pull out all the stops to prevent someone coming into power who is serious about changing the rules by which the entrenched remain entrenched. And it should be clear that many, many Democrats are as complicit in that structure of power and privilege as the Republicans are. And they dislike what Obama represents as much as the GOP does--and so Hillary is their girl.
Since the stakes are so very high, they will do whatever it takes to prevent Obama from being elected. And so now the strategy is simply to paint Obama as the candidate of the hard left. Hillary's strategy is transparent in this regard. Her being behind this whole Ayers thing and her comments yesterday about MoveOn are designed to paint Obama as George McGovern deja vu. She wants the superdelegates to believe that she is the only choice if they don't want the disaster of 1972 again.
I've resisted indulging in any anti-Hillary screeds here. I've said simply that I don't want her to be the Democratic nominee because she really is old school when we need new school. I've said I don't like her militarism and don't trust her to effect the kinds of foreign policy changes that we need to recover from the Bush idiocies. And I've said that I would vote for her if she were the candidate. I'm not sure I could now. I've long thought of her and Bill as Republican Lite politicians, but she has come to embody everything that is most loathsome about Republican Heavy.
I did not at first give any credence to the idea that she wanted McCain to win this year so she could run again in 2012, but I'm beginning to think there may be something to it. She probably feels more comfortable with what McCain represents than with what Obama does. Neither she nor McCain really want the basic system of power and privilege to change. That system defines political reality as they understand it, and both understand that world, are comfortable with it, and have succeeded playing by its rules. They don't see that anything is fundamentally wrong, and think it's naive to think it could be changed, anyway. Hillary and McCain are both anti-change candidates.
But I doubt that this redbaiting strategy is going to work well enough to turn things around for Clinton's candidacy. And there's an advantage in this business about Ayers and Dohrn coming out now rather than in the Fall. It gives the Obama campaign time to develop a defense and counterattack, and I think the Obama group gets it in a way the Kerry group didn't. This campaign will not allow Obama to be framed.
Rather than be afraid of the big, bad red-baiting Republicans we should remember that they have a profoundly flawed candidate, and I trust the Obama/Axelrod/Plouffe team to develop an effective strategy to insure McCain's defeat that will significantly contrast with Kerry's inept attempt to defeat the even more profoundly flawed Bush. And I trust a majority of Americans to be disgusted with this kind of thing. Nevertheless, the sooner Obama can be done with Clinton the better. She needs to be sidelined as soon as possible.
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UPDATE: To reinforce the point about Hillary's entrenchment as the anti-change candidate, I just saw this Michael Savage quote over at Sullivan's:
Hillary, I know what to expect from her, which is eight horrible years, but I'm not so sure she's still a Leninist. Her husband has made so much money in so many different capitalist ways that I actually think they've matured and become good Americans. [laughs] No, there's a paradoxical statement I've just made. In other words, I think the Clintons probably started out as far-leftist characters in their early years, but they've been around so long in the power structure and now, finally, they've been allowed to make so much money and they've circulated with the rich for so long that I think she's a safe bet. In fact, there's an argument to be made that she might be a safer bet than McCain in that regard.
Read the Media Matters piece on Savage which quotes him as saying that if Hillary wins the election,
"you're gonna get more of the lesbian-feminist propaganda thrown in your face than with [Sen. John] McCain, but other than that, it's gonna be almost the same exact -- the same exact administration."
It might be something of an exaggeration--McCain isn't likely to do much about healthcare, for instance--but given a little wiggle room for political hyperbole, it's probably more right than wrong. Anyway Obama is the real threat, not Hillary--he's an Afro-Leninist.
The idea of Bill and Hillary being far leftists in their youth is laughable, but it's probably true that they were more idealistic than they are now. It wouldn't surprise me if Bill and Hillary look at Obama and see something of their lost past. But the difference between the idealism of Bill and Hillary then and the idealism of Obama now is that power always drove them--that's the one thing that hasn't changed. I'm not saying that Obama isn't ambitious; it's just that something else drives that ambition, and it seems more resistant to the kind of corruption that has so obviously infected the two Clintons.
Obama is not pure. He has to play the game, and he will have to make compromises, and he will be soiled by it. But so far, at least, he hasn't become identified with the game. On the other hand the game defines Bill and Hillary--they have little identity outside of it. In the end the game might destroy Obama, but so he has resisted being absorbed into it or spat out by it. He's in the game, but not of the game.