Some grudges never die.
Even as Hillary Clinton stumps for former rival Barack Obama, some Clinton supporters are still toiling to bring him down.
Clinton activist Heidi Li Feldman and her political action committee, The Denver Group, have turned a small amount of contributions into a few amateurish TV ads that have run in such battleground states as Ohio and Pennsylvania. Feldman, a law professor at Georgetown University, says she served as a volunteer legal consultant to Clinton’s presidential campaign.
The ads, run under the banner “Democrats for Principle before Party,” include this one which brings up Obama’s former pastor, the controversial Rev. Jeremiah Wright. “A candidate who says he has the judgement to be president from Day One waited until Day 2,411 to cut his ties with someone who said America got what it deserved on 9/11.” Then, in a line sure to push the buttons of Democrats old enough to remember, the ad brings up side-by-side pictures of Obama and the late President Richard Nixon, and poses the question liberals used to raise about Nixon: “Would you buy a used car from this man?”
The Denver Group doesn’t have much money, so the ads won’t air widely. The group has raised about $68,374 since forming in June and its big goal now is $15,000 by Election Day, an incredibly small amount by general election standards.
Another ad in the Obama-Nixon series says Obama won the Democratic nomination “as a result of a rigged roll-call vote.” Never mind that it was Hillary Clinton herself who called off the roll-call vote to nominate Obama by acclamation at the convention.
A third ad (below) faults Obama for the costly decision to hold his nomination speech in a football stadium instead of the convention hall in Denver. The chronology is a little problematic: the ad implies that Obama made that decision while Lehman Brothers was collapsing, when actually the investment bank didn’t fall until weeks after the speech. With a nifty pun, the ad accuses Obama of turning the economy into “a political football.”
This originally appeared on The Secret Money Project Blog, a joint project of CIR and National Public Radio tracking the hidden cash in the 2008 election.
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