Bill Clinton not too swift on attack

NY Times:

Bill Clinton’s suggestion that his wife faced a Republican-style “Swift boat” attack during and after the last Democratic debate drew a rebuke yesterday from Senator Barack Obama, who said, “I was pretty stunned by that statement.”

The comments by the former president, at a postal workers’ convention in Nevada on Monday, came as he discussed efforts by the moderators and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Democratic rivals at the debate on Oct. 30 to get Mrs. Clinton to give a quick and clear answer on the issue of driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants.

By invoking the so-called “Swift boat” advertisements of the 2004 presidential campaign, Mr. Clinton was calling to mind one of the most divisive episodes of that campaign, when the Democratic nominee, Senator John Kerry, saw his Vietnam War record questioned by a group called the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

“We listened to people make snide comments about whether Vice President Gore was too stiff,” Mr. Clinton said, “and when they made dishonest claims about the things that he said that he’d done in his life. When that scandalous Swift boat ad was run against Senator Kerry.”

“Why am I saying this?” he continued. “Because I had the feeling that at the end of that last debate we were about to get into cutesy land again.”

Mr. Obama, in an interview yesterday with The Associated Press, said the former president was reaching in linking criticism of Mrs. Clinton to the Swift boat advertisements.

“How you would then draw an analogy to distorting somebody’s military record is a reach,” Mr. Obama said.

Jay Carson, a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, said Mr. Clinton had not been referring to Democratic candidates’ criticisms of his wife but to Republicans’ criticism of her debate performance.

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Carson's explanation s as ridiculous as Bill's. The most devastating response to Hillary's debate performance was a You Tube by Democrat John Edwards and there was nothing really unfair about it since it used clips of Hillary "explaining" her positions.

I don't even accept his premise that the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads were unfair. They were eminently fair criticism of John Kerry's criticism and smearing of all Vietnam vets. The Democrats just do not want to admit that they agreed with that unprincipled smear of troops in Vietnam because they thought it was politically useful to help them lose the war. There were no significant factual errors in the ads and the most devastating was the one which featured Kerry making his bogus allegations against the troops. What really made the ads effective was Kerry;s pretense of being on the sides of the troops he was smearing.

By trying to attack the critics of Hillary's statements Bill and her staff are keeping the memory of her disastrous performance before the voters. It is time for them to MoveOn.

Michelle Malkin discusses Bill's complaint and defines Swift boating as "telling the truth about Democrats."