James Lewis wrote "Hillary's Oedipal Problem," a scathing review of some of the most damning features of her life. I try to avoid pillorying Hillary while I'm criticising her, even some of the most verifiable facts Lewis reports are gross indictments and are consistent with much tamer efforts to establish that, temperament-wise, she's not the kind of person most progressives can vote for.

Lewis reports that Hugh Rodham, Hillary's father, 

replicated the barracks experience in his own home, commanding loudly from his living room lounge chair (from which he rarely rose, except for dinner), barking orders, denigrating, minimizing achievements, ignoring accomplishments, raising the bar constantly for his frustrated children ---"character building," he called it."

Lewis here is quoting Carl Bernstein's book. In it, no less a fair witness than Senator Bill Bradley confirmed what many people have reported, that Hillary is an uncompromising, intensely hostile person when she is opposed. The quote from Bradley is,  "At one meeting with Democratic senators, Hillary openly threatened to 'demonize' any member of Congress who opposed her plan..."

I won't go on, but there's much more of this sort in the article. 

I don't agree that this is just character asassination and that it will split the party. Hillary has to address criticisms of her temperament now, or she will be destroyed in the general. It will be ten times uglier than anything we've ever seen or heard of in politics, because, as the above and many other quotes illustrate, there is much solid evidence and opinion of fair witnesses to back up attacks against her for being self-defeating and destructive of the interests of the people.
 
There needs to be much more vetting. She could survive this if she would confess her inadequacies. That would change everything, and he could then pick her for VP. She's a brilliant and experienced politician whom he could mentor and be mentored by. Wouldn't that be a complete gas!

There is absolutely no proof that Obama ever said or did anything that could remotely be consider heartless toward working people or radical. None of the guilt by association investigations has unearthed any proof. Yet many commentators continue to assert that Obama is a radical and is so effete that he couldn't possibly passionately represent the interests of working people.

I can imagine that some readers of this post might be sputtering, saying, for instance, "But he was close to Wright," etc. The argument is, that, if he was close, he must agree with Wright. But that's not proof. That's a clue. Clue's are valid enough to trigger an investigation, but they're not proof. I'm not expecting the kind of proof you need to prosecute someone in a courtroom. I'm talking about someone overhearing Obama say something radical. You would think that, if he believes in radical ideas, someone at some time in his 46 years of life would actually overhear hiim expressing them. That to me is a much more credible assumption than that this man must agree with people he cares about and learns some things from. Again, nobody has yet to come forward to report that he actually does agree with Wright, Ayers, or heartless snobs.

Because guilt by association attacks have undermined Obama's credibility, I think it's important for us to expose these attacks for what they are, seductive but empty charges. They are seductive. They imply and sometimes explicitly allege radicalism and heartlessness on Obama's part as if there were proof despite the complete absence of proof.

We who believe in Obama's genuineness ought to be as relentless as his detractors in demanding proof. Instead of only defending himself and decrying attack politics, Obama too can sharpen his response by exposing these attacks and making this article's demand. He can put the "prosecution" on the defense by demanding that they produce something he's said or done besides associate with someone to back up their accusations. "Where's the beef," can give way to a new political rallying cry, Where's the proof.

The guilt by association attacks against Obama are working partly because they aren't explicit. Too seldom do his accusers actually say what their accusations imply.  For instance, people say he was wrong to have been on a board with Mr. Ayers, the former violent radical who still feels it's okay to bomb government buildings. But what's implied is that Obama secretly agrees with Ayers. Unfortunately, Obama too seldom addresses the implied charge. He defends by arguing the facts of his association with this radical. And when he does address the devastating charges, he only argues in a brief paragraph that radicalism contradicts everything he has always stood for.

Of course, everyone who has every worked or been in school with him knows that he's genuine. But the swing voter who is taking him up and down in the polls is bewildered, often being swayed by the drumbeat of attacks against him. What to do?

In other posts, I've laid out a series of steps for countering this problem. In this one, I want to elaborate how making the implied accusations explicit and addressing them rather than the stated accusations, how doing that can work for Obama.

My new idea was inspired by reading several articles that do make the implied accusations explicit. The authors make their case by compiling all the details of his associations with Wright. The idea here is that flurry of facets of his associations will increase the worry that Obama is guilty. For instance, they report that Obama said Wright was his "mentor," a "sounding board," and an "inspiration." They tell the entire story of the relationship, emphasizing the length of the association--twenty years, and the intimacy implied not only by "mentor" and "sounding board" but also the wedding service and the two baptisms. These facets of the relationship all seem to add to the final conclusion I've seen in these kinds of accusatory articles, that Obama must agree with Wright's radical beliefs.

This gaggle of facets seem to add credence to the basic logic, that because Wright and Obama were associated, Obama must also be a radical. The more facets there are, the more the accuser seems satisfied that his argument makes sense. But there's no real proof other than the association. There's nothing in any of these articles that show Obama actually saying or doing something radical.

That's what's got to be exposed in this post's "getting above the fray," analytical style. Obama has to, as I've said in previous posts, elevate to a statesman role and help us see through these attacks not only for the sake of his candidacy but also for the sake of the health of our democracy.

The same logic applies to the infamous "bitter" sentence he uttered in San Francisco. Pundits have parsed that sentence to death, arguing on both sides that it either was or wasn't evidence of heartless snobbery and a resultant inability to stand up for and passionately pursue the interests of working people. But no one has found any evidence for the heartless snobbery charge. Indeed, Obama's life story and his positions prove the opposite point.

We need to get clear about this problem and relentlessly demand of his accusers that they give us some proof that he has said or done something heartless to working people or something radical, that he is not who he says he is.

An important controversial piece of Hillary's history is her handling of Congressman Cooper of Tennessee during her attempts to push through her health care plan. Her defenders argue that Cooper's alternative plan didn't contain any genuine reform and so should have been rejected. Cooper argues that he had a plan that would move health care reform forward, albeit at a slower pace, and that the votes for a more aggressive plan just weren't there. He also says that Hillary vilified him upon first hearing his opposition to her plan and that he doesn't think she has changed much. She's only adopted a manipulative strategy of going along to get along, often surprising former antagonists with her ability to be agreeable. But she hasn't accomplished anything of presidential significance, having given up her passion for major change so as to remake her image for political purposes. Her scorched earth approach to beating Obama make the pont that she really hasn't changed and, therefore, is incapable of forging sufficient consensus to create substantial change.

What follows is a detailed recounting of what actually happened involving Cooper that advances the public debate about who Hillary really was and is. It concerns Bill Clinton's successful efforts to gain a compromise with Cooper and Hillary's subsequent torpedoing of that compromise. Here's a quote from Andrew Sullivan's Atlantic Monthly article, "Take Two: Hillary's Choice."

One Saturday in late September, Schneider, Cooper, and Bill Clinton set out for an early-morning round of golf at the Army-Navy Club. Discussion soon turned to health care. Ever the deal maker, Clinton started probing Cooper for the possibility of a compromise. “Clinton was an artist at negotiation,” says one member of the group. “There was a lot of common ground there, and he had a good sense of the public mood about health care.”

It started to drizzle, so Clinton invited the group back to the White House, where the talk continued into the afternoon over beers. Cooper canceled a trip to Tennessee and kept listening. By the time he left that evening, says the source, “it was very close to a handshake.” Clinton’s parting words were, “Look, I think we can make this work. But Hillary’s leading this, and you’ll need to have a meeting with her.” [Some commander in chief.]

Cooper agreed. But when he met with the first lady shortly thereafter, it was as if the golf outing had been just a dream. “She was looking for Jim to surrender 100 percent,” says one source with knowledge of the meeting. “It was brutal,” Cooper told me. Things collapsed quickly, and no deal was struck. Hillary Clinton’s major initiative died ignominiously many months later, without even coming to a vote. [Bill undercut, it seems.]

It does seem that she's not the kind of person who can forge major change, because, as many who knew her back then have attested, she's too uncompromising and vicious. It has been argued that she tried to destroy Cooper's career, despite that Cooper, although conservative, was widely admired for his temperament and willingness to listen to opposing views.

As to her present viciousness, it has been well chronicled. I first tuned into this aspect of her personality during the Ohio debate. It's difficult to imagine anyone not noticing the barely restrained humiliated fury in her expression, voice, and words, the kind of fury she displayed openly to fellow politicians during the health care debacle. Because she has falsely accused Obama of privately supporting NAFTA, of by innuendo, being a black radical, and much more, it does seem that she is not the kind of person who could help create enough of a lasting progressive majority to create substantial change.

Of course, historical inquiries and attempts to get to know her now are limited, and it's possible her critics just don't know enough to back up the above now standard criticisms of her. But we must try. We must continue to respectfully debate whether she has the temperament necessary to be the kind of president so many of us on the left want.

Put yourself in the shoes of the swing voters, especially the independent ones, the folks who are taking Obama and Hillary up and down the polls. These people are vulnerable to guilt by association attacks. Even Obama has trouble understanding and dealing with these attacks; indeed, he's been badly wounded by them--not enough to lose the nomination but enough to make things too close for the comfort he used to enjoy.

Okay, now that you're in their shoes a bit, think how it must feel to them when people publicly vilify Obama's accusers. That counter-attack implies to the swing voters, "Because Obama's accusers are so obviously ridiculous and poorly motivated, you must be ridiculous for even considering their criticisms." Consider a specific kind of swing voter, someone who echoed Hillary's not so subtle accusation against Obama when she said, "I would've left Wright's church." Those people who had been leaning to Obama started also saying, "Why didn't he leave that church?"  Again, if Obama and his supporters were to start attacking Hillary for her remark, that would also denigrate the voters swayed by her attack and further alienate them from Obama.

We've got to find an alternative to accusing the accusers and denigrating the accusations by calling them "ridiculous," "too negative" or "gotcha politics." We've got to take the accusations seriously, which is often what Obama does. Unfortunately, when he respectfully deals with the accusations, he isn't very effective. That's because he deals with each accusation piecemeal, argues the facts of each accusation, and sometimes lapses into accusing the accusers and attacking the attacks. But he doesn't have to resort to counter-negativity. Here's what he can do.

He can act like a leader, a statesman rather than like the accused in a public trial. He can rise above the fray by taking on the problem of guilt by association politics, not just his problems with it. He can help us understand that this kind of politics and journalism subverts our democracy.

Instead of indirectly berating people for succumbing to it, he can explain empathically that it is a difficult problem, one that he also has trouble with. He can explain that his serious bout with this problem has led him to try to understand it more deeply and then help Americans evolve out of this difficult trouble. He can give us historical perspective on this problem to further help us accept that it is a serious problem rather than a stupid failing; he can draw an analogy to the McCarthy era and review the recent history of guilt by association politics.

I've covered other steps he can take to complete this elevated talk in previous posts. Perhaps the one I received the highest praise for is, "Obama's Unwitting Condescension Toward Swing Voters and What to Do About It." You can successfully google that title.

The swing voters, especially independents, may be vulnerable to the guilt by association attacks against Obama. So it's important to keep up the counter drumbeat, helping them to see through what are truly deceptive, subtle arguments. The fact that so few people, including Obama himself, are doing a great job of deconstructing these charges, is a clue that the swing voters who are beguiled by these attacks are, of course, not stupid; rather it's just difficult to see through these attacks. Here's some help.

Obama's accuserss are keeping up the pressure arguing that, because he has said that Wright was his "mentor" and a "sounding board," he must secretly agree with some of Wright's radical views. These are sub-points in the overall guilt by association attack that's wounding Obama's candidacy.

Elsewhere, I've argued that there is zero proof in anything Obama has said, voted for, or in any other form done that could be characterized as radical. He's always been a pragmatist trying to help the middle and lower classes to improve their lives without doing what radicals do, threatening the systems that give us stability and grossly degrading opponents. But what about Obama's guilt by association in terms of the two charges?

The term, "mentor," can mean that Wright taught and supervised the implementation of his radical views. But Obama has never said that Wright was his political mentor. He was a spiritual mentor. And what Obama learned from Wright that Obama valued had nothing to do with God damning America. The values he learned were the opposite. Wright is filled with love, as well as fury. He taught the love of Jesus and God. That's what Obama has said he learned from Wright. There's no evidence for the accusatory view of Wright's mentoring.

The same kind of distinctions apply to Obama's use of Wright as a "sounding board." This phrase has been used against Obama, because it can imply that Wright was instructing Obama in radical politics. But all of the public statements Obama has made about using Wright as a sounding board reduce Wright's role to only whether Obama is being truthful and honest regarding what he, Obama, believes. No one has ever said that Wright instructed Obama to believe radical views anymore than he has instructed another famous congregant, Ophra, to believe them. Martin Marty, the world-renown caucasion theologian at the University of Chicago is also a member of Trinity, and no one has ever accused him of being a radical.

Unless journalists and politicians can specify that Obama actually said or did something radical, they should be denounced for repeating these guilt by association charges. They should be denounced for subverting our democracy.

At least with regard to these two sub-charges, the widely employed claim that, because Wright was mentor and sounding board for Obama, Obama must secretly agree with Wright, makes no sense when you look carefully at what actually has been said by both parties.  

An unappreciated reason that guilt by association tactics work is that the reasonable sounding accusers only imply a devastating criticism. And victims of this tactic tend to respond only to the stated, somewhat harmless accusation. I'll illustrate.

Regarding Obama's association with Wright, Hillary has only said, "I would have left the church." Obama then explains why he stayed in the church. The implied attack, that Obama is a closet black radical, too seldom is addressed. 

Some swing voters are infected by this attack. The ones I know of are worried, but they too only repeat Hillary's charge, "Why didn't he leave that church; he should have." They seldom say, "Because he stayed in that church, he must be a closet black radical." They're not even thinking about the implied charge, but when I probe, they realize that it is a worry for them. That subliminal effect of guilt by association charges is what gives them their power.

Obama must offer this and other deconstructions of guilt by association tactics, as I've suggested in other posts. If he rose above the fray and began to lead us out of our vulnerability to guilt by association charges, he would once again dominate this election.

Obama limped out of Pennsylvania, clinging to his overall lead. Meanwhile, the opposition is having their way with him. Take for instance Patrick Buchanan's article today (Op-Ed, SF Chronicle, 4/29/08). He well captured the now seemingly permanent wounding of Obama. Tucked into his politically motivated onslaught was the reasonable worry shared by many that Obama may be too effete and too radical to represent most Americans.

The effectiveness of this two-pronged criticism is attested by many otherwise supportive commentators and Obama's slippage in the polls. And the drumbeat will continue, get louder and further limit his appeal.

He must make a major speech to reverse this trend. And the speech should elevate him into his statesman role that he so effectively used in his speech on race. The point would be not just to address the attacks against him but to at least begin to lead us out of attack politics altogether.

To regain our allegiance, he first must, as he did in his speech on race, empathize with people who are influenced by these attacks. He has to do that, because, at this point he seems unresponsive to those people at best and, at worst, condescending to them for being gullible.

He needs to explain that decades of Americans' vulnerability and politician's helpless in the face of these attacks should help us accept that this is a difficult problem to understand and deal with. After all, Joe McCarthy took the country down a very dangerous path and ruined the lives of good people. Obama can say that even he has been tricked by these attacks. He can confess that, despite all of his education, he didn't realize that his reactions to these attacks made things worse. He made a terrible mistake by trivializing these attacks, of thinking that guilt by association is just ridiculous rather than a formidable problem from which our democracy is suffering. Like many pundits who think that guilt by association is only ridiculous and reprehensible, he unwitthingly made people feel ridiculous for being taken in by it. In so doing he added to the impression that he's a snob who secretly cares little about the average person.

Now he has studied this problem, taken it seriously, because, again, he realized that he really didn't understand it and, therefore, couldn't help people deal with it. Like the natural leader that he is, he took on the responsibility of leading Amerca toward freedom from this kind of divisive politics and toward greater unity.

He's learned that guilt by association attacks are powerful in people's minds because of what the attackers mean but seldom say. For example, when Hillary says, "I would have left Wright's church," she can seem to mean that Obama is a closet black radical. She never has said that, but she doesn't have to. People can't help at least in the back of their minds worrying about whether he's a black radical. But because only the extremists make this accusation openly, he seldom addresses it. He argues about why he stayed in the church. He's fooled into overlooking the implied accusation and focussing on the stated one. Even when he says he disagrees with and rejects Wright's wild views, as he did today, he is addressing the problem too narrowly, not taking it seriously enough.

He can complete the empathic phase of his talk by summarizing that human beings are vulenrable to guilt by association attacks. That's part of our nature that we hopefully can evolve out of.

He can lead us by presenting to us a method for dealing with this devisive kind of politics and journalism. First, we should always treat the attacks with respect, because sometimes they're true, and even when they're not, they're difficult to put into their proper perspective. He can admit that disrespectful attacks against people for attacking people only make it difficult for the average person who's trying to figure out what's true. We've got to stay out of that trap.

Second, he must explain that we must always bring the hidden attack out into the light of day. He can demonstrate that principle, saying,

I bet that some of you are worrying that, because I stayed in Wright's church for 20 years, I must be a black radical like him or that I must secretly agree with some of the terrible things he said. And because I was associated with a radical militant, Mr. Ayers, I must also be one or must agree with that way of dealing with our problems. And because I have advanced degrees and speak the way I do that I couldn't care less about the plight of the average American. You may think that the things I said in that meeting in San Francisco are proof of that.

We need to notice that journalists and politicians who attack me spend 90 percent of their columns and commentary talking about how terrible are several people I had some association with. They go over and over all the things they've said and done. They're whipping up the fear of their listeners, making it seem that I am on the verge of bombing the Pentagon or that I want to build an African colony in Illinois. They never spend any time showing the results of an investigation of me that might prove the guilt by association attacks. They just keep implying that I must be some kind of radical or heartless snob.

He can explain that after the hidden charges are brought to light, if we really want to the know the truth about somebody, we must demand hard evidence for the attacks. Here's what he might say along those lines to his accusers to demonstrate this principle.

You say I'm a radical. Show me one quote of me that makes that point. Show me one measure or policy I've privately or publicly supported with a vote, a statement, or some other action, something other than that I have an association with somebody who is a radical or truly uncaring toward Middle Americans. Show America and the world real proof. (I'm certain he could do a better job than I of listing the kinds of proof we should demand.)

Moreover, he can add that he will submit to an intensive, open-ended, face-to-face questioning by representatives of the media on the left and the right. Kerry did this in New York too late and with too little fanfare, but the journalists ended up siding with him.

Then he can say,

Unless real proof that gets beyond the guilt by association level comes out, we've got to call the endless repetition of these charges what they are, politically motivated attempts to undermine the democratic process. We should denounce and reject them.

You will see in the coming months of my campaign that I will handle all accusations with the above principles in mind. Moreover, I will bring out more complete information showing that my concerns about health care and jobs are genuine and entirely consistent with my history. And I will be encouraging journalists who are repeating these charges without proof to take their proper role of reporting the facts by investigating and reporting the facts of my life rather than just doggedly repeating gilt by association charges.

You know, my caucasion mother was the most empathic, caring person I ever have met. She taught me that everyone, no matter how humble their circumstances, deserves the utmost respect and support. I honor her by asking you to join with me in protecting us from divisive people who seem not really to care. We must prevent them from undermining our ability to make an informed choice in the voting booth and from picking the person who best cares about and can change America for the betterment of all the people.