Letters to the Editor
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I'm sure Obama appreciates the advice
BUT I doubt he's going to bite Mr. Penn, I mean Conason. The Clinton's have many questions to answer. I take it you'd be just as dismissive of the Giustra/Uranium deal if rather than former Pres. Clinton, it is 2010 and former president Dubya was criss crossing the Middle East helping his friends from Texas gain oil contracts, and coincidentally these friends donate 130,000,000 to Bush's newly formed "Bush Freedom Initiative Fund."
Stop shilling for the Clinton's, it's unbecoming of you.
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Gotta Love Salon
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/03/05/rezko/index.html
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Gotta agree
Obama will not be served well by going negative, at least, not if he uses the kitchen-sink approach that Hillary has used. Obama should stick to main-campaign, policy-related criticisms, that he can then turn back around to tout his own abilities and experience.
It's really damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't for Obama right now. If he matches Hillary's attacks with counter-attacks, Obama is accused of violating his "hope" message. If Obama ignores Clinton's attacks, he is accused of being weak. If he merely objects without attacking, he is accused of being thin-skinned.
The best option is for Obama to attack just enough to keep Clinton off-balance, but otherwise maintain his original message and keep playing to his strengths. Obama is a strong candidate and he's made it this far. Clinton wants to make Obama falter, but she won't be able to as long as Obama stays focused and doesn't let her tactics overly distract the campaign.
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In the minus column.
Sorry, but this is a bad article, Joe.
If Clinton has nothing to hide, which may very well be true, she should just release her tax returns. If it was incumbent upon Rick Lazio to do so seven years ago, as per Howard Wolfson then, surely it's incumbent for Sen. Clinton to do the same, now that she seeks the highest office in the land.
Also, frankly I'm rather surprised you don't take a harder line against the comparison of Barack Obama to Ken Starr. Given how much time you spent fighting Starr and his ilk, I thought you would find the comparison hyperbolic and insulting to the extreme.
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I expect better than this
Joe writes:
So far, as the trial of his former patron Antoin Rezko unfolds, nobody has even suggested that Obama did anything illegal or unethical to advance his relationship with the indicted Chicago developer. Yet many questions are still unanswered about that relationship, which included well over a hundred thousand dollars in political contributions and simultaneous real estate purchases that concluded three years ago with the Obama family owning a South Side mansion (and the Rezko family owning an adjacent lot that enlarged their celebrated neighbor's yard space).
I'm somewhat surprised by the duplicity in this pair of sentences. And then there's the fact that the first sentence is clearly false - people other than just Joe Conason are suggesting that Obama has some wrongdoing here to account for. Indeed, if they weren't, Conason wouldn't be writing an article telling Obama to respond to them.
If Conason has something specific, not just a few innuendo-ridden references to ways in which Rezko might have helped Obama, perhaps he should help the democratic process along a little and make them, and I mean make specific allegations that, if true, clearly show wrongdoing on the part of Barack Obama. Because from where I look, the very first paragraph of this article looks like an attempt to push Whitewaterish smears like those that the Clintons had to suffer for most of Bill's presidency.
Unless those specific allegations are made, rather than the "suggestions" that Conason is at once claiming nobody is making, and repeating himself, what, exactly, is Obama supposed to be answering?
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If he has nothing to hide, then why won't he answer questions
The same can be said of the Clintons. Their tendency to obfuscate rather than honestly answer is well known and is as disturbing as it ever was. Clearly the Clintons need to provide their tax returns and Bill needs to release that list of donors to his library. The longer they hold out, the longer it looks like they have something to hide.
But as of right now, Obama is no better. Oh, I know that Glenn Greenwald says there's nothing to the Rezko story, but if so, why won't Obama talk to reporters?
Obama says he's a new kind of politician practicing the politics of change. But his refusal to cast light on his murky dealings with Rezko sure seems like politics as usual to me.
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Also
As Chris Sinnard notes below, it's really sad to see you attempting to engage in the smear-by-association regarding Tony Rezko. (Read Greenwald's piece, noted below, when he explicitly compares said attempts to exactly what you and Gene decried in The Hunting of the President.)
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All True...
Though he should also take care in making sure that the deflections his campaign takes bounce right back on hers. To whit: their adoption of the Rove playbook; the fact that two of the other defendants in the Rezko trial are Clinton donors; and that, initially it was her campaign who contacted Canada in regards to NAFTA.
While responding to the criticism honestly, it doesn't hurt to be on the offensive as well. They do need to find a graceful way to utilize the Clinton campaign's current Swiftboat approach to make them seem all the more craven.
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Hillary Rodham Clinton
Joe Conason rocks.
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What has the monster got to hide?
Who knows.
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One Sec...
"...Yet many questions are still unanswered about that relationship, which included well over a hundred thousand dollars in political contributions and simultaneous real estate purchases that concluded three years ago with the Obama family owning a South Side mansion (and the Rezko family owning an adjacent lot that enlarged their celebrated neighbor's yard space)...."
C'mon, Joe: As your colleague, Glenn Greenwald, has pointed out, there's nothing remotely wrong with that deal, as any Net Diver can readily find from a number of neutral, fact-oriented sites. Obama and his wife wanted to buy a house and land but the owner wanted to sell that parcel along with an adjoining one at the same time. Obama mentioned it to Rezko, a long time political backer and friends of a number of Chicago politicians, including the current governor, I believe, and his wife eventually bought the adjoining property for about 700,000 bucks. Later, Obama wanted to expand his property and bought, for about 105,000, a ten-foot strip of land, about 1/6 of the total acreage. The amount he paid Rezko's wife was about 1/6 of the value of the property. He didn't gain an monetary advantage from the deal and neither did she.
If everything's on the up and up with Ms. Clinton, let her release her returns as everyone else has done. And, do it well before the Pennsylvania primary [let's face it "on or about April 15" doesn't exactly cut it, in terms of full disclosure].