Oh, the negativity! The poor dears at the New York Times have a sudden case of the vapors, and have taken to the fainting couch. Hillary is a meanie! Her campaign "vacuous, desperate, pander-filled"!
The editorial's lone example of all this "heavily negative" campaigning is Hillary's ad which they claim--on the basis of a split-second view of bin Laden--waves "the bloody shirt of 9/11."
A Clinton television ad — torn right from Karl Rove’s playbook — evoked the 1929 stock market crash, Pearl Harbor, the Cuban missile crisis, the cold war and the 9/11 attacks, complete with video of Osama bin Laden. “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen,” the narrator intoned.
Imagine the temerity! Hillary makes a case that she's better equipped to handle a crisis than Obama. Sakes alive, they "stopped the presses" for that? Incidentally, the "narrator intoned" a statement that originally came from President Harry Truman who knew something about the rough-and-tumble of politics and, to my knowledge, never went around whining about it.
The editorial worries that "the voters are getting tired of it," and that what they call "negative campaigning" turns off voters. There wasn't much sign of that in the Pennsylvania primary now, was there? The turnout broke all records. The squemish at the New York Times may have their hearts all a-flutter, but the voters seem energized.
Then, apparently feeling the need to balance things out, they took Obama to task because, when Hillary criticized his reaction about "bitter" voters, Obama said Hillary was trying to be like Annie Oakley. "All this does," the Times piously intones, "is remind Americans..about his relative youth and inexperience." Nonsense. It made his point, it was light-hearted, and it was funny.
Those New York Times people. They need to get out more.
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