Hillary’s Voice

Last week, economist Paul Krugman made it very clear that he finds John McCain’s gas tax holiday proposal potentially harmful. Krugman also made very clear that he doesn’t like Hillary Clinton’s counter-proposal but considers it harmless.

That said, Krugman reportedly heard about (but has not seen) a negative Obama ad that falsely uses Krugman’s criticism of McCain as an attack against Hillary. At his blog, Krugman made it very clear that he would be displeased if Obama’s ad did this:

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.”

Between 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina (with help from Mr. Rove and Mr. Limbaugh), George Bush managed to get a few million Americans riled up whenever other people questioned their president — as though the questioners were calling Bush fans’ mamas “ugly.”

Brilliant strategy: getting people emotionally invested to the point that they took personally any political opposition to a guy most of them weren’t even friends with.

Six days ago, I received an email evincing that Barack Obama’s campaign staffers are using a similar tactic. In part, the email reads: