Senator Clinton recently stood on stage and said "Shame on you, Barack Obama." How does the eminently wise Fray crowd think the public will react to her new tactic.

My inclination (full disclosure: I am a strong supporter of Senator Obama) is to believe that this will result in a significant drop in Senator Clinton's poll numbers and election results. I was rather nervous that she'd be able to hold on to Texas and Ohio and spin a "momentum" narrative of her own into a brokered convention. However, I now feel confident she will lose Texas at the least, and most likely both Texas and Ohio.

Her outburst demonstrates her failure to comprehend a few key lessons from this election:

(1. Going negative doesn't help her. Time and time again, from South Carolina to Wisconsin, the harder Clinton attacked, the worse her numbers became. I suspect the campaign attributed her New Hampshire victory to increasing emphasis on attacking Senator Obama's record, when in fact they should have given more credence to her "Diner Sob". The way gender influences our perception of political candidates is a topic for another post, but I suspect women are able to get away with showing emotion more easily, and men are able to get away with showing combativeness.

(2. Going positive does work. Showing emotion, finding her voice, acting with class and grace--these are all positive attributes for Senator Clinton, when she opts to use them. Voters reward her for it. After the debate, I was, again, genuinely worried that her rousing conclusion could be parlayed into a string of momentum-changing victories. This will blunt or--more probably--reverse those potential gains.

(3. Voters are informed. In the early nineties, it would have been easier to express outrage about some fliers, insinuate that they were malicious and false, get a couple powerful friends in the press to agree with you, and let your victim try to respond. Now, we're instantly able to see the fliers, to cross-reference their statements, to form nuanced opinions, and to reject claims that are overly stated. I suspect this will happen here: if Senator Clinton wants to quibble with whether she used the word "boon", or whether she only thought NAFTA was beneficial, it clearly doesn't justify the indignancy she showed yesterday.

(4. On a related note: consistency matters. Most voters are aware of the tenor of her conclusion to the debate Thursday; most of them have seen her say she was honored to be on stage with Senator Obama, and shake his hand. Now, they see her expressing outrage at materials that his campaign had distributed long ago.

There are only two alternatives here: either she knew about the material, or she didn't. If she didn't know about them, she dangerously out-of-the-loop and running a truly, madly, deeply disfunctional campaign. People have been talking about the health insurance flyer for quite some time, and I would hope that Senator Clinton has long been aware of it. If she did know about it, then what changed between Thursday and Saturday? There was no significant development on the campaign trail, other than the fact that most pundits were characterizing the debate as a situation in which she really needed to knock Obama down, and that she hadn't accomplished it. If this is the case, this kind of government of the pundits, by the pundits, and for the pundits would be pretty disturbing.

The most significant factor, I believe, is #1. Running against the "change" candidate, you cannot try to cast yourself as the "shame" candidate and hope to succeed. With the amount of coverage that the incident has generated, and with the way Senator Clinton came off during her news conference, I suspect her "Day of Shame" will prove to be the straw that broke the camel's back. We'll be able to get a pretty good idea of whether or not that's true if polls taken after February 23rd show a sharp drop-off for Senator Clinton; this could well be her "Dean Scream".

Hi bentontheworld,

I always enjoy reading your posts. Read my take on the flyer flap in my "Hillary Hypocrisy" post above. It adds another dangerous and potentially deadly angle to this controversy: that Hillary will be branded a hypocrite.

I think results are mixed on the negativity issue. According to the TrailHead folks, Obama's Wisconsin numbers dropped from their high level among voters who made up their minds less than a month before the election (66%) to voters who made up their minds less than a week before the election, after the negative ads began running (55%). Now, the Texas Xerox Massacre would seem to indicate that negativity isn't working, but maybe she's still holding out hope that it will. OR...maybe she's hoping that, by painting OBAMA as the negative candidate, HIS numbers will drop.

The constant shifts in tactics, though, remind me of Anthony Bourdain's profile in KITCHEN CONFIDENTIAL of a restaurant that's failing: the owner tries all kinds of fixes (changes in menu, new price specials, live music, a new chef) to entice people, not realizing that every new twist only alienates the customers one already has. "Experience" didn't work, so we switched through, "Change," "Hope plus experience," "Ready on Day One," to the current "Best Defense is a Good Offense."

The "boon" thing is interesting, because I gather the quote appeared once, in a Newsday article, and nobody else has run it. Of course, Clinton's mailer cites an AP report about Obama from Sept. '04 that I can find NO RECORD OF, even in the AP database.

Hey, wait a second: something just occurred to me. In the flyer I got from Clinton on Friday, she mentions a blog saying that Obama's claims on her NAFTA stances were "bogus" (in truth, the blog says the claim is "really fairly bogus"). She complained about his flyers on Saturday, so, clearly, she MUST have known about the NAFTA claims earlier. Perhaps it's just the presentation she disliked?

Nice posts. I could not agree with the two of you more.

What worries me, is all the talk of Obama as presumptive nominee, and that it could spur some support for HRC. She seems to fair better when she's a little behind. Maybe it's just superstition on my part.

A quick point about the numbers in Wisconsin: remember, Obama was the only one campaigning in Wisconsin for most of the time after the Potomac Primaries, so it makes sense that he was winning far more voters during that time. The last month was also about the time that Clinton was publicly minimizing the importance of Wisconsin, having explicitly established Ohio and Texas as her "firewalls" and insinuating--in many people's minds--that the other states didn't matter. She was indicating at least a minimal interest in Wisconsin immediately prior to the election, so it makes sense that the numbers dropped, regardless of negativity.

In short, I suspect that the factor causing that switch was interest, not beneficial negativity. Of course, I could be wrong.

Interesting tidbit on the mailers; I wonder how much Obama will come after Clinton on the "hypocrisy" charge in the debate. On one hand, he has a pretty good case. On the other hand, the high road would offer voters a sharp and appealing contrast.

Time will tell.

Actually, Hillary talked about them on national TV with George Stephanopoulos on February 3rd. They actually showed the flyers on the show, and she commented on them then. She wasn't outraged, but she commented she felt that he was being misleading.

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I read the flyers online, and the statement is something like "she'll make you pay for health-care if you can't afford it." She even says on the show "Yes, we will have an enforcement mechanism." Well, if your wages have to be garnished, it seems like there's a good chance one reason you're not paying for it is because they can't afford it. That sounds fairly accurate. In the broadcast, she repeats the old "his plan leaves out 15 million people" mantra, and that number has been widely discredited, but she keeps using it.

I think her real frustration is that it brought up NAFTA. She includes her participation in the Clinton Administration as part of her experience. So, I think it's fair to link her to it. She may have been "silently against it" but so were people who in that administration at the cabinet level, and they have to take responsbility for it, too.

Not time to gloat on the prediction yet, but it does seem that Clinton's poll numbers are headed south, right around February 23rd ("Shame on you" Day). Here's Ohio.

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