Hillary goes negative

Employing innuendo and haft-truths against Sen. Barack Obama, Sen. Hillary Clinton and her husband, the former President, have introduced the politics of personal destruction to the Democratic presidential campaign. They bear responsibility for cheapening the tone of the contest. Sen. Clinton began distorting Obama's record in Monday night's debate and yesterday began airing a television attack that twists a recent Obama statemant about former President Ronald Reagan to the point of clear inaccuracy.Bill Clinton, meanwhile,has wrongly accused Obama both of injecting race into the debate and of running a negative campaign against his wife.

They have gone well beyond engaging in tough political jousting while steering the campaign far from the substantive issues. Their tactics are reminiscent of the unproductive , distasteful mudslinging that started with Bill Clinton election and continued through George W. Bush's reelection.This is not to say that Obama deserves a free pass from scrutiny and criticism. Nor is it to endorse him as the better of the two candidates. It is only to express distress that the Clintons have cross the line into attacks that raise questions about how she might campaign were she the Democratic nominee and how she might govern were she elected to the Oval Office .The truth, as Clinton well knows, is that Obama supports hiking the minimum wage and opposed fat-cat tax breaks.And the truth, as she knows, is that Obama merely cited Reagan as an example of a President who transformed American politics by reaching out to Democrats and Independents. PLEASE CHANGE!!!

Thursday 1-24-2008 nydailynews.com