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Mistakes haunt Obama campaign
09/03/2008 14:11 - (SA)
Washington - The election campaign of Barack Obama has been shaken by a series of missteps and outright mistakes that are providing fodder to Democratic rival Hillary Clinton's rebounding campaign.
On Friday, it took Obama foreign policy adviser Samantha Power, 37, just a few hours to submit her resignation after the British daily The Scotsman quoted her as saying that Clinton was a "monster."
But these key hours were used by the Clinton camp to convert the whole episode into a test of Obama's character and qualifications.
Even though Power quit, Clinton said her remarks had raised "disturbing questions" about the team assisting the Illinois senator.
The resignation of Power, a professor at Harvard University and a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, has reminded Americans of another incident involving an adviser to Obama, economist Austan Goolsbee, 38.
Goolsbee, a professor at the University of Chicago, was quoted as saying in a note sent home by a Canadian diplomat that Obama's criticism of the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) did not really reflect his determination to promote free trade.
Since these remarks were revealed, not a single day has gone by without the Clinton team using them to point to Obama's presumed duplicity.
The irony is that, according to the Canadian prime minister's chief of staff quoted in the press, it was the Clinton campaign that had sought to reassure Ottawa that its criticism of Nafta should be taken with a grain of salt.
But a spokesperson for Clinton adamantly denied that report on Friday.
Obama campaign director David Plouffe acknowledged that the Goolsbee matter had been handled poorly.
But taken together with a bad week that was marked by Obama's triple electoral defeat in the primaries and caucuses in Texas, Ohio and Rhode Island and the opening in Chicago of a trial of a businessman who had financed Obama's previous political campaigns, the incident gives an impression of amateurism that is plaguing the Obama team, said James Rubin, a foreign policy adviser to Clinton.
"I feel sorry for her, that she has been put in a position where he can't run a foreign policy team," Rubin said on a Clinton campaign conference call, referring to Power.
"It's the man at the top who has not organized himself."
This impression was reinforced by another statement by Power, who told the BBC that Obama's commitment to withdraw all US troops from Iraq within 16 months was only a best case scenario that was likely to be revised.
Plouffe replied by saying that Obama's Iraq war vow was a "rock-solid commitment."
"If the Clinton campaign wants to have a serious debate about who opposed the war in Iraq and who's more committed to ending it, we're more than happy to have that debate," Obama's campaign said in a statement Saturday, citing Clinton's vote to authorize US military action in Iraq.
"But they should stop playing politics with war, and they should stop telling the American people things that they know aren't true."
Since Tuesday's primaries, Obama has cut back his activities to a minimum: he had only two public events in Wyoming Friday and so far failed to divert the attention of the media to other matters.
While Obama has shown some irritation with press in recent days, he has called for a more high-minded debate and stopped short of a full-blown assault on Clinton.
"We will not let this campaign be about who can tear each other down," his campaign said. "We owe it to the American people to try to lift this country up."
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