Bill Clinton was on the attack regarding his wife’s flubbing of the immigration question in the recent debate:

“We saw what happened the last seven years when we made decisions in elections based on trivial matters. When we listened to people make snide comments about whether Vice President Gore was too stiff. And when they made dishonest claims about the things that he said that he’d done in his life. When that scandalous Swift Boat ad was run against Senator Kerry…I had the feeling that at the end of that last debate we were about to get into cutesy land again…I think it’s fine to discuss immigration. We should…But not in 30 seconds, yes, no, raise your hand. This is a complicated issue.”

The response from the field:

Sen. Chris Dodd called the Clintons’ response to the debate “outrageous.” “To have the former president come out and suggest this is a form of swiftboating … is way over the top in my view,” Dodd said…

Asked in New Market, N.H., if he was piling on the Democratic frontrunner with the rest of the all-male field, Edwards said, “No.”…

Obama, the Illinois senator, chuckled in an interview with The Associated Press when he said he “was pretty stunned” by Bill Clinton’s statement…”I mean, I think it’s assumed that we are running for the presidency of the United States of America and that we’ve got to answer tough questions,” he said, adding that Hillary Clinton’s contradictions attract criticism. “How you would then draw an analogy to distorting somebody’s military record is a reach,” Obama said of Bill Clinton’s comparison.

Ironically, President Bill Clinton used the term Swift Boat correctly, since the essence of swiftboating is to use truth as a weapon against posturing, though of course he did not mean it that way, and the other candidates did not take it that way either.

But take another look at President Clinton’s statement above. Does it not seem insecure in its reference to “trivial matters” making a difference? Is this an oblique reference to a certain candidate’s likability factor? And isn’t it a little early to bring out the big guns, the SwiftBoat charge, that seems to have such a powerful emotive quality in Democratic circles? We detect an undercurrent of insecurity in such an over-the-top attack. But maybe we’re wrong.

UPDATE

Mickey Kaus adds some points that mesh with ours, regarding this electoral development that Michael Barone is now calling A watershed moment on immigration:

Hillary Clinton’s lead in New Hampshire is now only 10 points in Rasmussen’s robo-poll — down from 23 points in mid-September…Hillary has now used two of what she must have considered the most powerful weapons in her arsenal — 1) the gender victim / Rick Lazio card, and 2) her husband — and they both backfired. Doesn’t that make them hard to use again?

Perhaps that was a whiff of panic in the air. Illegal immigration is terribly unpopular among Democrats of virtually all demographic backgrounds. Karl Rove should have figured this out as well.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 7th, 2007 at 11:39 am and is filed under Democrats, General, MSM, Polling, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.