Earlier this week, I highlighted one of the major problems for the Clinton camps "we're bigger, we're badder, we're ruffer, we're tougher" electability argument. TNR's Isaac Chotiner, riffing off of a column in New York Magazine by John Heilemann, adds an additional element that I hadn't considered:
...for months now the Clinton campaign has been trying to sell reporters on the idea that Obama is too much of an unknown quantity to face the GOP in November. Do the Dems really want to take a huge risk and nominate him, they ask? But, when you have spent years bragging about how tough you are, people assume that if there was anything terrible out there on your opponent, you would have found it by now. This is why the controversies over things like Barack Obama's kindergarten papers have made the Clintonites look foolish. Not only do they appear nasty and negative, but they also signal to the press, "Hey, we're the best in the business and all we could find on this guy was that he wanted to be president at age five." You have shot yourself in the foot...twice.
On several different occasions, I've seen surrogates for Clinton claim that once people start digging, they'll find all kinds of dirt on Obama. But when pressed, each time they have been forced to admit that, no, in fact they don't have anything specific they can cite, but that they are just sure that the dirt must be there.
But Isaac makes a great point here. The Clintons have spent nearly two decades now building a reputation - undeserved, I argued here - as master campaigners. They've spent the better part of the last few months telling anyone and everyone who would listen that they, and only they, are ready to take on the GOP attack machine. And yet when it comes to Obama, they've got nothing more than that apparently meaningless Rezko story.
Maybe the dirt is there, maybe not. I don't have any way to know one way or the other. But the Clinton camp presumably has the time, money, and level of interest necessary to do the necessary research. And yet, so far at least... nothing.
Add to that the fact that Obama has constructed a narrative that places Clinton's attacks as part of "yesterday's politics," and you can see how the Clintons have worked themselves into quite a bind.
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