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player ready...by Mike Dorning
KINGSTREE, S.C.—Even as he repeated complaints that Hillary and Bill Clinton are spreading falsehoods about his record, Barack Obama today dismissed suggestions that bad feelings from the Democratic primary campaign would hinder the party in the fall or depress turnout among African-Americans if Clinton is nominated.
“Black voters shouldn’t blame Senator Clinton for running a vigorous campaign against me,” Obama said during a press conference following a rally here. “That should be a source of pride. It means that I might win this thing.”
Obama added that he is “confident that the Democrats will rally together” for the campaign in November because the differences among the Democratic candidates “pale in comparison” to differences with Repulicans.
Several party leaders including Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) and House Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.) have reportedly contacted the Clintons in recent days to ask them to tone down their rhetoric against Obama lest the increasingly bitter tone of the campaign risks divisions in the party. Party leaders particularly have worried that African-American enthusiasm to vote could be dampened if Clinton is nominated through a campaign that is perceived as unfair to Obama.
Obama was peppered with questions about a radio ad his campaign is airing in South Carolina that charges Clinton is “making false attacks” and will “say anything to get elected.”For more than a week, Bill and Hillary Clinton have seized on a remark Obama made in a newspaper interview that Republicans were “the party of ideas” during the 1990s to suggest that the Democratic presidential candidate is, in fact, an admirer of the other party’s policies.
Obama has vociferously argued that they are mischaracterizing his statement, which he made as part of a comment pointing out that both Ronald Reagan during the 1980s and congressional Republicans during the 1990s succeeded in reshaping the political debate to win passage of major policy changes.
On Wednesday, the Clinton campaign began airing a radio ad in South Carolina juxtaposing his remark with Republican positions anathema to the Democratic party faithful such as preventing an increase in the minimum wage. Obama has supported increases in the minimum wage.
At the press conference, Obama said his radio ad questioning the Clinton’s truthfulness is a “direct response to an ad by the Clinton campaign that had been discredited.”
“When you run an ad making assertions that everybody who has looked at it says are wrong, you know that they’ve said it’s wrong, and you still make it, then that would indicate that you’re not very concerned about accuracy or the truth,” Obama said.
Shortly after the press conference, Obama’s wife Michelle sent out an email fundraising appeal to Obama supporters around the nation condemning the Clinton’s “win-at-all costs tactics.”
“We expected that Bill Clinton would tout his record from the nineties and talk about Hillary’s role in his past success. That’s a fair approach and a challenge we are prepared to face,” she wrote in the email.
“What we didn’t expect, at least not from our fellow Democrats, are the win-at-all-costs tactics we’ve seen recently. We didn’t expect misleading accusations that willfully distort Barack’s record,” she continued.