Intraparty Tactics Questioned

Sunday, January 13, 2008

LINGERING TENSIONS

Intraparty Tactics Questioned

The presidential campaign has moved on from New Hampshire, but it has left behind deep fissures and feelings of resentment among local Democrats that some fear may linger all the way until November.

Some Barack Obama supporters, stung by his loss to Hillary Clinton, are lashing out at female Democratic leaders in the state who criticized Obama's commitment to abortion rights. Their e-mail went to many New Hampshire voters two days before the primary.

"People are very upset about it," said Bill Siroty, a former Democratic chair for the town of Amherst and an Obama supporter. "I've heard one or two threaten they're not going to vote for Clinton at all. Tensions are very high, and it could cause a rift."

Bette Lasky, the assistant state House majority leader and a top Clinton supporter who was involved in the e-mail, said she was sorry to hear about the bad feelings but hopes Obama's supporters will get over it.

"It's politics, and it happens," she said.

The e-mail, echoing a mailing by the Clinton campaign, criticized Obama for voting "present," instead of "yes" or "no," on several abortion-related bills while he was in the Illinois Senate. The e-mail was signed by a who's who of the state's Democratic establishment, dominated by women who supported Clinton in the primary.

Obama supporters say the accusation, first laid out nearly a year ago, is unfair, noting that Democrats in the Illinois Senate often voted "present" on controversial legislation, not to duck issues, but as a tactical response to Republican efforts to force them into unpopular votes that could be used against them.

To try to defuse the e-mail and mailing, the Obama campaign last Sunday rushed out an automated phone call from a New England Planned Parenthood official vouching for Obama. The Clinton campaign, in turn, complained that the call had gone out to at least two people on the do-not-call list, against state rules.

Lasky said the letter should not prevent Democratic unity come fall. "The stakes in this election are too high to be risked because of a last-minute letter," she said.

Other Obama backers are upset that Clinton volunteers challenged the right of some Obama supporters to act as poll moderators, leading in some cases to the dismissal of some Obama-friendly observers.

"You work so very hard for so very long that, yeah, there are raw feelings the day afterward," said Jane Clemons, a state representative and the Nashua Democratic chairwoman. Her son Nick Clemons managed Clinton's campaign in the state. "We try to give people time to get over it," she added.

-- Alec MacGillis

THE PERSONAL TOUCH

Obama Ad Invokes His Mom

Barack Obama got personal yesterday, invoking his late mother in his first advertising aimed at a pair of the Super Tuesday states that vote Feb. 5.

"My mother died of cancer at 53," the senator from Illinois says in an Arizona commercial that opens with a photo of the two of them when Obama was a young boy. "In those last painful months, she was more worried about paying her medical bills than getting well."

The ad complains about 20 years of failed efforts in Washington to revise health care -- a period that includes then-first lady Hillary Clinton's unsuccessful push to change the system -- and says nothing will happen "unless we stop the bickering and the lobbyists."

Obama is not shy about drawing on his life story; an earlier commercial noted that he grew up without a father. His mother died in 1995, when he was a Chicago civil rights lawyer and University of Chicago Law School lecturer who was running for the state Senate. It is not clear why he could not have given her financial assistance, and a spokesman said he had no information on that question.

The second ad, airing in California, raises the issue of global warming, as Obama warns a group of people about "our addiction to foreign oil," adding that "in the process we're melting the polar ice caps." Obama portrays himself as a truth-teller, saying that he "went to Detroit to insist that we have to increase fuel-efficiency standards" and that "the room got kind of quiet."

Obama delivered more than bad news in his May speech at the Detroit Economic Club. He proposed that the federal government pay for 10 percent of health-care costs for retired workers if domestic automakers would put half the savings into fuel-efficiency equipment, and he offered various tax incentives, as well.

-- Howard Kurtz

IT'S THE ECONOMY IN MICHIGAN

Two Claims of Empathy

In Michigan, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) traded barbs about who is more responsive to the state's economic woes.

Romney, who held a news conference yesterday outside General Motors' Willow Run plant in Ypsilanti, spoke of how this week's announcement that 200 people are being laid off from the plant underscores "the long-term slide in the automotive industry, the domestic automotive industry."

"You hear some say that these are jobs that are just going away, and we better get used to it. But where does it stop?" Romney asked, referring to recent remarks by McCain.

Romney criticized his rival's support for a mandatory federal cap on carbon emissions and tighter fuel-economy standards for vehicles, arguing that both measures would harm the U.S. auto industry.

McCain appeared at a Defending the American Dream Summit in Livonia, where he said American automakers and other entrepreneurs can adapt to the shifting global marketplace, even by reducing their greenhouse gas emissions.

"America remains the world's innovator; we can and should be at the forefront of green technology," McCain said.

-- Juliet Eilperin

DRUNKEN DRIVING

Clinton Adviser Is Arrested

NASHUA, N.H. -- Sidney Blumenthal, a senior adviser to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, was charged with aggravated drunken driving a day before the New Hampshire primary.

Nashua police said Blumenthal was arrested early Monday after an officer pulled over a car traveling 70 mph in a 30 mph zone. Blumenthal, 59, is a former White House adviser to President Bill Clinton who is volunteering on Hillary Clinton's campaign. He will be arraigned later this month.

-- Associated Press