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Watch Your Own Backs, You’ve Got no Support from the Top

By Mark I Posted in 2008 | Barack Obama | Hamas | John McCain | Liberals | Obama campaign | Obamafiles — Comments (2) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Moe Lane points to a Jake Tapper Piece detailing the numerous times Sen. Barack Obama has placed blame on his advisers for his radical policy positions. Less noticed is the growing tendency for Obama to drop those advisers like hot rocks the minute that their comments explaining Obama’s positions become known.

It all started with the case of Austan Goolsbee, the University of Chicago professor and Obama economics adviser who was caught telling Canadian officials, no doubt in English and French, that Sen. Obama didn’t really think that NAFTA needed to be renegotiated. It was all just campaign rhetoric, Goolsbee helpfully explained. The following week, Samantha Power, Harvard professor (Obama apparently collects university professors) and Obama campaign foreign policy adviser told the BBC that Obama had no intention of following the plan he had campaigned on for close to a year for getting U.S. troops out of Iraq. “He will, of course, not rely on some plan that he’s crafted as a presidential candidate or a U.S. Senator,” she said. But of course; and pardon me, but would you have any Grey Poupon?

Power resigned from the campaign, allegedly because in the same interview she referred to Sen. Hillary!™ Clinton as a “monster.” But Clinton’s negatives are so high that it would have been hard for most of America to find fault with that statement. No, the more damaging comments, and the ones she was kicked to the curb over, were the ones that exposed Obama’s real position on Iraq, and exposed him as a typical politician saying one thing to get elected while planning to do something else entirely.

Last week, another Obama adviser was unceremoniously dismissed for doing his job. Only this time, Sen. John McCain’s campaign deserves credit for forcing Obama to reduce his adviser corps by one. McCain pushed back hard on the question of Obama’s relationship with the Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, and forced Obama’s hand. The incident further revealed the thin-skinned nature of the Obama campaign, and provided a model that McCain should follow for the remainder of the election.

Read on…

McCain had been mentioning Hamas’ stated preference for Barack Obama in some of his appearances in recent weeks. That prompted the notoriously prickly Obama to respond that McCain was “losing his bearings,” a none–too-subtle reference to McCain’s age in the minds of the McCain campaign. That prompted the McCain campaign to issue a blistering statement reiterating the Obama-Hamas connection.

We have all become familiar with Senator Obama's new brand of politics. First, you demand civility from your opponent, then you attack him, distort his record and send out surrogates to question his integrity. It is called hypocrisy, and it is the oldest kind of politics there is.

It is important to focus on what Senator Obama is attempting to do here: He is trying desperately to delegitimize the discussion of issues that raise legitimate questions about his judgment and preparedness to be President of the United States.

Through their actions and words, Senator Obama and his supporters have made clear that ANY criticism on ANY issue — from his desire to raise taxes on millions of small investors to his radical plans to sit down face-to-face with Iranian President Ahmadinejad – constitute negative, personal attacks. […]

Today, Senator Obama is complaining about comments John McCain made about a senior Hamas advisor stating that Hamas would welcome Senator Obama's election as president. Indeed, on April 13th, senior Hamas political advisor Ahmed Yousef said, 'We don't mind – actually we like Mr. Obama. We hope he will (win) the election and I do believe he is like John Kennedy, great man with great principle, and he has a vision to change America to make it in a position to lead the world community but not with domination and arrogance.'

The McCain campaign has never suggested that Senator Obama supports Hamas' agenda, but it is more than fair to raise this quote about Senator Obama because it speaks to the policy implications of his judgment.

Just today, the president of Iran, whom Senator Obama wants to meet with unconditionally, called the state of Israel a 'stinking corpse.' Iran is the paymaster and state sponsor of Hamas.

In his victory speech this week, Senator Obama stated that 'wisdom' is meeting with our enemies, including Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, North Korea's Kim Jong Il, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Cuba's Raul Castro. John McCain couldn't disagree more. Rather than giving tyrants and dictators the prestige of meeting with an American president, John McCain will instead meet with the champions of human freedom around the world and opposition leaders fighting for liberty.

That’s a pretty hard body slam from McCain, who has stated his desire to campaign on the issues and avoid the negativity of past presidential campaigns. But Obama’s ties to Palestinians have been known for a while. Rashid Khalidi, who did a fundraiser in 2000 for Obama, represented the terrorist PLO President Yasser Arafat in the Oslo negotiations. The next day, however, Obama Middle East adviser Robert Malley resigned from the campaign when a British newspaper reported that he had met regularly with members of Hamas as part of his work with the International Crisis Group. Suddenly, Obama’s debate pledge to meet with the leaders of America’s enemies, from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Hugo Chavez, to Kim Jong-Il, was more than just campaign rhetoric. A high-level adviser was actually meeting with Hamas, who somehow got the impression that Obama would be the best president for its interests. What exactly was Malley telling Hamas? And was it on the Obama’s campaign’s behalf?

We’ll never know because McCain’s aggressive pushback on the issue helped make Malley the latest casualty of the rapidly shrinking Obama campaign’s desire to keep the candidate’s positions from the American people until after he is safely in the Oval Office. At this rate, if McCain keeps the pressure up, Obama may have no advisers left by the time November rolls around. With the pickings this easy, McCain should make it a campaign goal to force Obama to shed an adviser every couple of weeks just to keep him off balance. And Obama advisers should be well aware that any statement they make or action they take on behalf of the Obama campaign is a potential firing offense. The Obama campaign is intent on assuring that the Senator from H.O.P.E.™, or his positions and beliefs, not be known to the public before the voting starts.