Obama camp cries foul over mailer
Posted: Sunday, February 17, 2008 3:34 PM by Mark Murray
From NBC/NJ's Aswini Anburajan
The Obama campaign today cried foul today over a health-care mailing that the Clinton camp distributed in Wisconsin.
The mailer, which shows a rainbow assortment of young and old Americans, asks: "Barack Obama, Which of these people don't deserve health care?" The line is a play off of Clinton's stump speech, in which she asks rhetorically who should she choose not to give health care to: The single mom? The waitress? The retiree?
On a second page it reads, "Barack Obama's plan says NO WE CAN'T, leaving 15 million people without coverage." It goes on to list bullet points claiming that the plan "wastes billions" and would cost Americans $1,700 per person." Obama has long claimed that his plan would cut costs more than any other's and would cut costs for individuals. But Clinton has seized on his plan's lack of a mandate to say he's not really offering universal health coverage.
The mailing also quotes a line from New York Times' columnist Paul Krugman -- a fierce critic of Obama -- saying that the candidate's claim that he is passing universal health care is "unscrupulous demagoguery from the candidate himself."
Sen. Ted Kennedy, responding to the mailing told reporters in a conference call that he had been fighting for universal health care for 38 years and would not have endorsed Obama if he didn't believe that he wasn't for it or couldn't pass it.
Kennedy also introduced a new line of attack on Clinton, saying that neither she nor her husband were initially for the S-Chip program which he introduced in the Senate with Republican Orrin Hatch after the failure of Clinton's health care plan in 1994.
Kennedy also told reporters that the Clinton campaign was resorting to the same kind of "fear mongering" that had scuttled her own health care plan in 1994 and called for the debate to remain positive.
But he had no answer for why the Obama campaign had also gone negative in their ads about health care and engaged in what some claimed was "fear mongering" as well, by dropping a mailer that had an eerie resemblance to the Harry and Louise ads that were released by drug companies to discredit the Clinton plan in the early 1990s. The ad released by the Obama campaign told them that the Clinton campaign would force them to pay for healthcare.
Kennedy instead responded that it was legitimate to debate the ways to achieve health care -- but not that Obama was against it.
"We've seen this in the past. Carter insisted there was health planning and cost containment. Those are legitimate debates. But what is not legitimate is to undermine the central position of Barack Obama of not being for universal comprehensive health care. That is the distortion… is a misrepresentation and that is fundamentally wrong," he said.
Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle (D), who also was on the call, and has unabashedly attacked Senator Clinton over the past week for not campaigning in the state, added his own line of attack, saying Clinton's style of campaigning in Wisconsin has been to attack Obama rather than talking to voters.
"It reflects how Sen. Clinton has conducted the campaign in Wisconsin. Before she even came to the state she started running negative TV ads which distorted Senator Obama's record," Doyle said.
