Obama attacks Clinton's veracity
Says voters misled on record, views Rival campaign charges hypocrisy
CHICAGO - Barack Obama's campaign, on the defensive for the past week, yesterday launched its most pointed assault yet on the character of rival Hillary Clinton, accusing her of routinely misleading voters for political gain.
Obama's campaign, in a memo and conference call with reporters, asserted that Clinton had been untruthful about her foreign policy resume, her position on the North American Free Trade Agreement, her involvement in the 1993 passage of the Family and Medical Leave Act, and her views on the renegade primaries in Michigan and Florida.
Clinton's campaign responded swiftly that Obama was in "political hot water given the news stories of the last few weeks and is desperate to change the subject." The Illinois senator has been dogged in recent days by his long association with a controversial Chicago pastor and tried to defuse the issue with a widely viewed speech Tuesday on race relations.
Obama's attack, the latest salvo in the two senators' increasingly acrimonious nomination fight, rounded up a number of earlier criticisms into a broad critique of Clinton's trustworthiness and her prospects in the fall against Senator John McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee.
"The American people are simply not going to elect someone they think is not being honest and trustworthy," said Obama's campaign manager, David Plouffe, pointing to what he called a "character gap" revealed in a new Gallup poll, which found that 53 percent of voters do not perceive Clinton as "honest and trustworthy," while more than 60 percent believe both Obama and McCain are.
"She would be a deeply flawed nominee," Plouffe said.
Clinton's campaign accused Obama of hypocrisy, citing his earlier promise not to "tear people down personally" during the presidential campaign. Her chief strategist, Mark Penn, also told reporters yesterday that "trust is an issue with all politicians," and argued that voters perceive Clinton as better able to handle the rigors of the White House.
"When you look at the rest of the polls, they're actually trusting Senator Clinton to do the most important tasks of the president," including protecting the "security of their family," he said.
"So that is trust," he said.
Obama's critique of Clinton's character came as new Federal Election Commission reports showed Obama with a significant financial advantage heading into the spring. After raising a record $55 million in February, Obama reported having $32 million in the bank to spend on the primary campaign. Clinton, who raised about $35 million last month, reported having less than $12 million in primary funds on hand.
Obama also snagged a coveted endorsement yesterday in New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, a one-time presidential contender whose support has been courted aggressively by both campaigns since he dropped out of the race in January. Penn belittled the endorsement that his own candidate - and her husband, former president Bill Clinton - had tried so hard to win.
"Perhaps the time when he could have been most effective has long since passed. Long since passed," he said.
With Clinton and Obama espousing similar positions on major policy issues, their primary campaign has turned increasingly on voters' impressions of their characters and attributes - their experience, judgment, likability, and candor - and the candidates' appeal to superdelegates, the elected officials and party leaders who could end up deciding the nominee.
After Clinton for weeks complained that the press was being soft on Obama, advisers to Obama yesterday chided the media for not vetting Clinton's campaign assertions more thoroughly and for what they described as her "doublespeak."
His campaign said that despite Clinton's assertions that she was deeply involved in major foreign policy initiatives during her husband's presidency, the records of her schedules as first lady - released this week by the National Archives - indicate otherwise.
Greg Craig, a State Department official in the Clinton administration who is now a top foreign policy adviser to Obama, said the records do not back up Clinton's assertions, including that she helped broker the Northern Ireland peace process and resolve ethnic conflict in the Balkans.
"Her claim to be the nominee is based on experience, and she argues that she is ready to be the commander-in-chief," said Craig, dubbing Clinton's trips abroad "largely ceremonial." "And yet, I think the evidence does not support her claims."
Obama's campaign also sent reporters a fact-checking analysis from the
On domestic issues, Obama aides argue that the 11,000 pages of schedules indicate that Clinton, who has made her criticism of NAFTA a centerpiece of her primary campaign, attended meetings specifically to advocate its passage. They say nowhere in the documents does it prove that Clinton, as she tells voters, helped pass the Family and Medical Leave Act.
"Central assertions in her candidacy have proven to be false," Plouffe said, adding that the Obama campaign plans to raise the "fundamental question of truthfulness" with voters in Pennsylvania, which holds the next primary on April 22.
Clinton's campaign called the attacks on her record and character "dishonest."
"It's no wonder that Americans are coming to see that for all of the rhetoric, for all of the speeches, his candidacy is really just words," said a Clinton spokesman, Phil Singer.
Another Clinton spokesman, Jay Carson, also cautioned that the schedules released this week should not been viewed as a "minute-to-minute, exhaustive compendium of everything Senator Clinton did when she was first lady."
"They are just a guide," he said.
On the Family and Medical Leave Act, Clinton aides distributed an activist's statement that Clinton was "instrumental" in the initiative. And on NAFTA, they said Clinton personally expressed misgivings, citing the account of a former Clinton White House adviser, David Gergen, who said on CNN last month that Clinton was "extremely unenthusiastic about NAFTA. And I think that's putting it mildly."
The two campaigns also continued their war of words on how to resolve the impasse over Michigan and Florida, both of which have been stripped of their Democratic convention delegates after they held January primaries not sanctioned by the Democratic National Committee.
Clinton, who is trailing Obama by more than 100 delegates, is aggressively pushing for new primaries in those states. Obama's campaign has rejected revote proposals so far as disadvantageous to him or legally questionable. Obama also is hitting Clinton for accusing him of disenfranchising voters when, last fall, she agreed that the two contests were virtually meaningless because the candidates agreed not to campaign in the states.
Scott Helman can be reached at shelman@globe.com. 