Hillary’s Voice

Since the Reverend Wright situation recently left splatter marks on Barack Obama, we’ve heard a lot from Obama’s campaign about how Hillary Clinton embellished the danger of her trip to Bosnia back in 1996, among other things.

Yesterday, the Washington Post reported on some of Obama’s own embellishments: i.e., his falsely taking credit for other U.S. senators’ legislative work. A few weeks ago, the Obama campaign sent a fund-raising email that 1) said that Hillary is attacking Obama’s supporters — a statement that’s as divisive as it is factually questionable; and 2) accused Hillary of being divisive.

Last night, I found a Time Magazine blog post called “Just Embellished Words: Senator Obama’s Record of Exaggerations & Misstatements.”

Time’s post begins:

“Once again, the Obama campaign is getting caught saying one thing while doing another. They are personally attacking Hillary even though Sen. Obama has been found mispeaking and embellishing facts about himself more than ten times in recent months. Senator Obama’s campaign is based on words –not a record of deeds – and if those words aren’t backed up by facts, there’s not much else left.”

Time’s post, which includes sources, explains roughly 10 instances in which Obama exaggerated or made outright misleading statements. A few items on that list are:

- His purported standing up to the nuclear-power industry

- His purported efforts toward “sweeping” ethics reform

- His purported bipartisan effort re: universal health care in Illinois.

There’s nothing new about a politician — especially during a campaign — exaggerating his or her positives.

But this is Barack Obama. His campaign has marketed him as above “politics as usual”: as someone with clean hands who not only doesn’t play the same game that all the other Washington politicians play, but also as someone who will (somehow) clean up the game.

It seems that every week, a new piece of evidence suggests that Sen. Obama really is just a good politician, who’ll say anything to advance his image and interest — even if his words clash with history or reality.

Cross-posted at Buck Naked Politics. For more evidence of Obama’s “embellishments” and “misstatements,” see the linky posts at Taylor Marsh and No Quarter.