Jim Geraghty is not buying the notion that Wes Clark’s attempts to diminish John McCain’s military service was done without coordination with the Democratic Powers that Be.
After statements by a half-dozen high-profile Democrats and Obama surrogates, you cannot persuade me that there is not a concerted effort on the part of Obama Democrats to criticize McCain on his war record. George McGovern, Jay Rockefeller, Tom Harkin, Democratic congressional candidate Bill Gillespie, Ed Schultz, Tony McPeak, and now Clark. Way too many to be coincidence. We’re seeing a lot more derisive comments about McCain’s wartime service than we are about Obama’s race.
To those examples, I’d add the “McCain didn’t learn the lessons of Vietnam because he was a POW during the worst years” meme that floated around recently.
OTB commenter Bithead isn’t buying Obama’s attempts to distance himself from Clark.
Obama’s been doing this all along; Surrogates end up saying the smears and other trash talk the campaign needs to spread, and when things get too hot because of what gets said, Obama simply tosses the speaker under the bus, and claims he’s running a ‘clean campaign’, and he’s shocked…. shocked… that any of his people would come up with such a comment.
Let’s leave Ed Schultz, a radio host who one reasonably presumes isn’t coordinating with anyone and Gillespie, of whom I’ve never heard, out of the mix. Do the remaining attempts to dampen McCain’s trump card, his military experience, constitute a pattern? And, even if they do, is doing this, as Dale Franks suggests, beyond the pale?
