Leading Obama Adviser Attacks Ex-President for Remarks

Because Bill Clinton is so calculating a person, let there be no doubt as to what he was implying by exclusion. Disgusting. This should be Hillary's "Reverend Wright" moment. RS



March 22, 2008
Leading Obama Adviser Attacks Ex-President for Remarks
By JEFF ZELENY
MEDFORD, Ore. — As Senator Barack Obama folded his arms and looked on, one of his leading military advisers forcefully defended Mr. Obama’s patriotism here Saturday and accused former President Bill Clinton of trying to employ “divisive attacks” to promote his wife’s presidential candidacy.

Mr. Clinton, in a speech to voters in North Carolina on Friday, said “it would be a great thing if we had an election year where you had two people who loved this country and were devoted to the interest of this country.”

At a town meeting here Saturday, retired Air Force Gen. Merrill A. McPeak, who is a co-chairman of Mr. Obama’s campaign, read the quote from Mr. Clinton. A few members of the audience gasped and hissed at the former president’s words.

“Let me say first, we will have such an election this year because both Barack Obama and John McCain are great patriots who love this country and are devoted to it — so is Hillary Clinton,” General McPeak said, speaking over loud applause. “Any suggestion to the contrary is flat wrong.”

Mr. Obama, on his first trip to Oregon before the state’s primary on May 13, did not address the comments from Mr. Clinton. He stood a few feet away from the retired general as he made his remarks before a crowd of more than 1,500 people in a Medford community center.

“I’m saddened to see a president employ this kind of tactics,” said General McPeak, who served as Air Force chief of staff in the early years of the Clinton administration. “He of all people should know better because he was the target of exactly the same kind of tactic when he first ran 16 years ago.”

The Clinton campaign dismissed suggestions that the former president had been questioning Mr. Obama’s patriotism during his remarks to a veterans group in North Carolina on Friday.

“I think it would be a great thing if we had an election year where you had two people who loved this country and were devoted to the interest of this country,” Mr. Clinton told the group in Charlotte, N.C., according to a report by NBC News. “And people could actually ask themselves who is right on these issues, instead of all this other stuff that always seems to intrude itself on our politics.”

In response to reporters in Oregon on Friday, General McPeak compared the former president to Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, who aggressively pursued those he believed to be communists in the 1950s. “I was going to college when Joe McCarthy was accusing good Americans of being traitors, so I’ve had enough of it,” General McPeak said.

The bitter exchange between the surrogates for Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama highlighted the rising tensions between the two Democratic presidential candidates in their prolonged fight for the party’s nomination.

“To liken these comments to McCarthyism is absurd,” said Phil Singer, a Clinton campaign spokesman. He said General McPeak was misinterpreting the remarks, suggesting it was an intentional effort to divert attention from a controversy involving inflammatory statements by Mr. Obama’s former pastor.