October 28, 2007
Obama Promises a Forceful Stand Against Clinton
By ADAM NAGOURNEY and JEFF ZELENY
COLUMBUS, Ohio, Oct. 27 — Senator Barack Obama said he would start confronting Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton more directly and forcefully, saying Friday that she had not been candid in describing her views on critical policy issues, as he tries to address mounting alarm among supporters that his lack of assertiveness so far has allowed her to dominate the presidential race.
Mr. Obama’s vow to go on the offensive comes just over two months before the first votes are cast for the Democratic nomination, and after a long period in which his aides, donors and other supporters have battled — and in some cases shared — the perception that he has not exhibited the aggressiveness demanded by presidential politics.
In an interview on Friday that was initiated by his campaign to signal the change of course, Mr. Obama said “now is the time” for him to distinguish himself from Mrs. Clinton. While he said that he was not out to “kneecap the front-runner, because I don’t think that’s what the country is looking for,” he said she was deliberately obscuring her positions for political gain and was less likely than he was to win back the White House for Democrats.
Asked in the interview on Friday if Mrs. Clinton had been fully truthful with voters about what she would do as president, Mr. Obama replied, “No.”
“I don’t think people know what her agenda exactly is,” Mr. Obama continued, citing Social Security, Iraq and Iran as issues on which he said she had not been fully forthcoming. “Now it’s been very deft politically, but one of the things that I firmly believe is that we’ve got to be clear with the American people right now about the important choices that we’re going to need to make in order to get a mandate for change, not to try to obfuscate and avoid being a target in the general election and then find yourself governing without any support for any bold propositions.”
For months, Democrats, including some within his campaign, have questioned whether his promise to pursue a brand of politics that transcended partisanship had so handcuffed him that he could not compete in the most partisan of arenas.
Alan D. Solomont, a former contributor to both Clintons who is now raising money for Mr. Obama in Boston, said there was a growing consensus that Mr. Obama had to ratchet up his intensity and draw sharper distinctions with Mrs. Clinton, of New York, and other rivals.
“The only way that he’s going to be able to be clear with the American people,” Mr. Solomont said in an interview, “is to draw a distinction between his candidacy and his ideas about change and those of other candidates. It’s fair to say that he is beginning to do that, but he hasn’t done enough yet.”
In the interview, Mr. Obama acknowledged that he had held back until now, though he asserted it was a calculated decision to introduce himself in early voting states before engaging opponents. He said he regularly took lines out of speeches prepared by his campaign that he felt were “stretching the truth.”
But Mr. Obama, of Illinois, said the plan had always been for him to begin taking on Mrs. Clinton more directly in the fall. And he glared and responded no when asked if he lacked the stomach for confrontational politics. “It is absolutely true that we have to make these distinctions clearer,” he said. “And I will not shy away from doing that.”
The interview came amid growing signs that Mr. Obama was looking for a fresh start for his campaign after nine months in which his aides said they were startled by the effectiveness of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, and worried that her support was not as brittle as they had once believed.
Mr. Obama has built up his campaign war room, started frequently traveling with a speechwriter — reflecting concern of his aides that his public speeches tend to be long-winded — and begun spending more money on television advertising in Iowa and New Hampshire.
His senior aides said they were now spending much of their day fielding calls from concerned donors and other supporters asking why Mr. Obama was not challenging Mrs. Clinton more forcefully and warning that he could cede the role of the main anti-Clinton candidate to former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, who is running an aggressive campaign in Iowa. Typically, one aide said, the supporter asks some version of the same question: “What happened to the Obama we saw at the 2004 Democratic convention?”
At the same time, aides said there was disagreement in the campaign about whether he should now begin investing all his time in Iowa, where polls show him to be running neck-and-neck with Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Edwards, hoping that a victory there would give him a lift in New Hampshire, where polls show him trailing.
Morale at his Chicago headquarters, aides said, has been dragged down by the perception that Mrs. Clinton is lapping Mr. Obama. And aides said that they had been struggling for weeks for a balance between offering a contrast with Mrs. Clinton and avoiding the anger that they said had marked Mr. Edwards’s candidacy.
In a 53-minute interview over breakfast aboard a chartered jet that brought him here from Chicago, Mr. Obama said Mrs. Clinton had been untruthful or misleading in describing her positions on problems facing the nation. He accused her of “straddling between the Giuliani, Romney side of the foreign policy equation and the Barack Obama side of the equation.” He said that she was trying to “sound or vote” like a Republican on national security issues and that that was “bad for the country and ultimately bad for Democrats.”
Mr. Obama suggested that she was too divisive to win a general election and that if she won, she would be unable to bring together competing factions in Washington to accomplish anything.
“There is a legacy that is both an enormous advantage to her in a Democratic primary, but also a disadvantage to her in a general election,” he said. “I don’t think anybody would claim that Senator Clinton is going to inspire a horde of new voters,” he said. “I don’t think it’s realistic that she is going to get a whole bunch of Republicans to think differently about her.”
Asked about Mr. Obama’s remarks, Mrs. Clinton’s spokesman, Howard Wolfson, said: “Senator Obama once promised Americans a politics of hope. But now that his campaign has stalled he is abandoning that strategy and is engaging in the same old-style personal attacks that he once rejected. We are confident that voters will reject this strategy, especially from a candidate who told us he would do better.”
Mr. Obama said he was not concerned by a repeated spate of national polls showing lopsided support for Mrs. Clinton. “The national press for the last three months has written glowingly about her and not so much about me, so it’s not surprising,” he said. He described himself as an “underdog” running against a campaign that has “a 20-year head start when it comes to managing the spin of the national politics.”
Many people are only beginning to focus on the race now, and early front-runners can easily stumble when the voting starts. But the Obama campaign has faced a political narrative in recent weeks that even Mr. Obama’s aides have described, in no small part because of a succession of polls, as establishing Mrs. Clinton as the front-runner. In one small example, a member of Mr. Obama’s national finance committee, Robert Farmer, told the campaign last week that he was formally switching allegiances to the Clinton campaign. Mr. Farmer contributed money to five Democratic presidential candidates this year, including the maximum amount allowed to Mr. Obama, Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Edwards.
Though Mr. Obama’s criticisms of Mrs. Clinton were sharper than he has voiced during this campaign, they were, nonetheless, still somewhat restrained, certainly when compared with the criticisms that have been voiced of Mrs. Clinton by Mr. Edwards and much of the Republican field.
Mr. Obama rejected the suggestion that he had been constrained in taking on Mrs. Clinton more forcefully because of his promise, at the start of the campaign, to avoid the bitter partisanship of past campaigns. Mr. Obama, who aides suggested might be spending too much time reading blogs and newspaper clippings about the campaign, dismissively noted how the Clinton campaign regularly raised that line against him.
“I’ve been amused by seeing some of the commentary out of the Clinton camp, where every time we point out a difference between me and her, they say, ‘What happened to the politics of hope?’ which is just silly,” he said, laughing.
Asked why it was silly, he responded: “The notion that somehow changing the tone means simply that we let them say whatever they want to say or that there are no disagreements and that we’re all holding hands and singing ‘Kumbaya’ is obviously not what I had in mind and not how I function. And anybody who thinks I have, hasn’t been paying attention.”
That said, Mr. Obama and his campaign have until now frequently avoided potential confrontations. Mr. Obama’s aides said, for example, that they had declined an invitation from some networks to appear on Sunday morning talk shows after Mrs. Clinton the day she appeared on five in one day to talk about her health care plan.
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