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  The Battle against Obama: Clintons Play Bad Cop, Worse Cop

The Battle against Obama Clintons Play Bad Cop, Worse Cop

By Gregor Peter Schmitz and Gabor Steingart

Part 4: 'Jesse Jackson Plus'

The Clinton team is also taking Hillary's challenger to task on the topic of abortion, long one of the most important issues for women within the party base. The fact that a majority of female voters chose Obama over Clinton in Iowa was a shock that her team hasn't been able to forget.

In a mailing that was sent primarily to women in New Hampshire, the Clinton campaign reported that when Obama was a state senator in Illinois, he abstained from voting on abortion bills seven times. "A woman's right to choose," the flyer continues, "demands a leader who will stand up and protect it."

With this sort of campaign advertising, Senator Clinton is directly targeting women, who make up 57 percent of registered Democratic voters. In the days leading up to the New Hampshire primary, pro-Clinton organizations spend up to $300,000 a day for mailings like these. The strategy was a success. It was precisely during the period just before the primary that many women switched to the Hillary camp. Her use of the gender card clearly paid off.

The Race Card

But the trickiest and, at the same time, most promising strategy Clinton's advisors have tried out is the use of the race card. It's a two-part strategy. The first part -- the official one -- looks like this. Clinton solemnly declares: "This election should not be about skin color or gender. We owe it to the achievements of Martin Luther King that we are here today. But sometimes our supporters are a little too passionate."

Nothing offensive -- so far. But part two of playing the race card gets more complicated and underhanded. The players know that society and its various ethnic groups react to certain code words. Ethnic groups can be influenced and played off against one another by using carefully worded racist undertones.

To counteract this racial polarization, Obama has taken steps to downplay the perception that he is exclusively on the side of African Americans. But the more clearly Obama identifies himself as a black man, and the more aggressively he claims the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., thereby following in the footsteps of failed black presidential candidates like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, the better it is for Clinton. She has nothing against allowing Obama to shrink into a minority candidate, an outsider who speaks on behalf of too few people to be able to represent the entire country.

Forced to Take a Stand

Her advisors have dubbed this tricky campaign factor "Jesse Jackson plus." Jackson, a Baptist minister and civil rights activist, ran for president twice, in 1984 and in 1988. Although he won 11 state primaries the second time around, Jackson was never the sort of serious national contender Obama has become today.

According to the logic of playing the race card, the more Obama is identified with the black community the whiter Hillary will appear. But how does one introduce this topic into a campaign without it backfiring?

One way is to qualify Martin Luther King's historical role, as Hillary Clinton did when she said: "Martin Luther King's dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964," she said in a television interview, adding "it took a president to get it done."

The unspoken message was clear. Dreamers don't change the world on their own. Actions count more than words, and experience is more important than inspiration.

Of course, this was a direct shot at Obama, and it forced him to declare his support for the Atlanta civil rights activist. It also forced him to shoot back at Clinton: "She offended some folks who felt that somehow diminished King's role in bringing about the Civil Rights Act." He had taken a stand on the race issue, and had even been forced to take sides, which probably ran counter to his original intention.

The Latino 'Firewall'

Clinton, on the other hand, probably wasn't interested in defending white politicians' contributions to the civil rights movement. She was thinking about another minority. Tensions have grown in recent years between African Americans and Latinos, as both ethnic groups compete on the social ladder. Studies have shown that many immigrants from Latin American countries are against having a black president.

The more Obama appears as the candidate of blacks, the stronger Clinton's support among Latino Americans becomes. Sergio Bendixen, one of the pollsters working for the Clinton team, is an expert on the voting habits of various minorities. He believes that the Latino vote is extremely important for Clinton's prospects, calling the Latinos her "firewall."

The purpose of firewalls in computers is to keep out harmful viruses. Applied to the campaign, the Latino American firewall works the other way around: it is supposed to contain the massive blaze Obama could set off.

According to this logic, a win for Obama in states with large black voting populations is a boon for Clinton in heavily Hispanic states. His gain from winning in South Carolina, a state with a large African American population, will likely be more than offset in California, a much larger state dominated by whites and Latinos. California also delivers substantially more delegates than South Carolina.

Obama and his advisors apparently did not expect such a powerful wave of attacks from the Clinton camp. "We sense that voters actually find our message more appealing. But the Clintons just happen to be incredibly cunning campaigners," says a close advisor to the senator.

The Mean Team

Meanwhile, Bill and Hillary Clinton seem perfectly comfortable with their respective roles: one of them barks, while the other one bites.

They have also discovered a new adversary: the Obama-friendly media in the United States.

When a CNN reporter dared to illuminate the Clintons' ingenious negative campaigning strategy, the former president indignantly responded: "The Obama people are feeding you these stories about our attacks because they know that that's what they crave. But the voters aren't interested. You should be ashamed of yourself."

And then he repeated, from the bottom of his heart: "Shame on you."

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan.

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