In the latest sparring match between the
increasingly bitter fight for the Democratic presidential
nomination, an Obama aide hit back by likening ex-president Clinton
to communist-hunting 1950s senator Joseph McCarthy.
Just weeks before a crucial primary clash in the
state of Pennsylvania, which will go a long way to deciding who will
face off Republican John McCain in the November election, former
president Clinton sparked a new row.
“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,” he told a group of
veterans Friday in Charlotte, North Carolina.
“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.”
Clinton was apparently referring to his wife and
McCain, leaving Obama out in the cold.
Obama advisor Merrill McPeak, a retired air
force general, responded on Saturday saying: “As one who for 37
years proudly wore the uniform of our country, I’m saddened to see
a president employ these kind of tactics.”
“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,” he told Obama supporters in Medford, Oregon,
with the Illinois senator at his side.
McPeak apparently referred to attacks Bill
Clinton sustained in the 1992 campaign from then-president George
Bush, who had raised questions about a trip Clinton took to Moscow
in 1970 during the Vietnam War.
McPeak’s criticism was even blunter on Friday,
when he said, according to television reports, that Bill Clinton’s
comments “sounds more like McCarthy.”
“I grew up, I was going to college when Joe
McCarthy was accusing good Americans of being traitors, so I’ve
had enough of it,” he said.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign swiftly denounced
McPeak’s comments as “a pathetic misreading” of the
president’s remarks.
“Comparing Bill Clinton to Joseph McCarthy is
an outrage and ought to be retracted,” Clinton communications
director Howard Wolfson said.
The New York senator’s campaign further railed
on the Obama camp for an “unremitting assault on her credibility
and character,” accusing him of attacking her to detract from
incendiary statements made by his pastor.
“They are throwing as many bombs as possible
because they are intent on deflecting attention from their political
problems” of recent weeks, Clinton spokesman Phil Singer told
reporters.
An Obama spokesman, Bill Burton, dismissed the
rival accusations as “reiterating tired lines of attack with no
basis in reality.
-- AFP
