No “Cat Fights” Between Hillary And Palin For Obama
“Attacking Palin is checkers; attacking McCain on the economy is chess,”
Clinton has been asked to concentrate on the working-class districts of Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan, where Palin will be competing fiercely for votes, and Florida, where women and Jewish voters may reject the Alaska Governor’s Christian, conservative, anti-abortion message.
Clinton, who has lived through the women’s movement, intends to frame the race in terms of a double-barreled McCain-Palin threat to issues that women care about, such as the right to an abortion, equal pay and universal healthcare, according to Florida congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
As such, she will be joining the roster of prominent women deployed by Obama to such good effect against Clinton herself during the primary campaign. Politicians such as Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius and Missouri senator Claire McCaskill have made the case that women could in good conscience vote for Obama rather than Clinton. (the death-by-a-thousand-cuts)
Now they are using the same tactics against Palin.
If Clinton is uncertain about going for Palin’s jugular, she may like to recall the words of a woman delegate at the Republican convention who described Palin as “more of a woman than Hillary and more of a man than Hillary”.
While the Obama camp has asked Clinton to step up her campaigning in the blue-collar states - such as Ohio and Pennsylvania - where she did so well in the primaries, Clinton has said she would also campaign in Texas, where she is not popular, because there is money there and she needs to pay off $US2 0million ($24.5 million) of campaign debt.
Her refusal to roll up her sleeves against Palin, who describes herself as “a pit bull with lipstick”, has already come under questioning by Democratic apparatchiks. “The strategic imperative right now is to do something about Palin and prevent her cutting through the race,” said Democratic strategist Tad Devine. “She is practicing the same slash-and-burn politics of division of the Bush years. Hillary Clinton can make the charge that Governor Palin represents the far Right.”
Palin has taken aim squarely at the 18 million voters who preferred Clinton to Obama during the primary campaign. It is a delicate mission for the New York senator to persuade them, after all her harsh words, that Obama is the right candidate for president.
But Not The Guy Below