Barack Obama goes all ‘Harry and Louise’ on Clinton

Voters under the age of 35 or so may not recall the most memorable cultural artifact of Hillary Clinton’s doomed 1993 health care reform package. Evidently someone in Barack Obama’s campaign does, and thought it would be clever to resurrect Harry and Louise, an earnest couple concocted by the health insurance lobby to do some high-profile fretting about the horrid implications of government intervention in your health care decisions, in an attack on Hillary Clinton’s 2008 health care policy.

Paul Krugman and Ezra Klein have the extended gasps of horror, but the gist of the matter is that the Obama campaign decided once again to attack Clinton from the right, this time by explicitly borrowing images and language from the same people who will, should he wind up in the White House, be out to do for his own modest health care reform package what they did for Clinton’s lo these many years ago.

Some Obama supporters are saying that the move is aimed at innoculating the eventual Democratic nominee, whoever that may be, against a Harry and Louise style dustup in the general election or afterward, a contention that is either naive or disingenuous.

My own take is that it’s another example of Obama recruiting Republicans, and that the decision to invoke Harry and Louise specifically reflects an irresistible urge to poke a Clinton sore spot, possibly provoking an intemperate response from one or the other of the couple, and a belief that it won’t backfire because many Obama supporters are too young to remember the ads and his older supporters have shown a remarkable capacity to either forgive or reinterpret his appropriations of Republican themes from the bad old days.

Anyway, I’m pulling the plug on this nonsense. It’s not doing me any good to write about candidates I would regard as irrelevant if I didn’t find them so repellent (your mileage will vary). So adios Barack and Hillary; wake me up when it’s over.

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7 Responses to “Barack Obama goes all ‘Harry and Louise’ on Clinton”

1. 1
   Montfort Says:
   

   “So adios Barack…”

   But still vote for him?

   I was planning to vote for Kucinich regardless, so I can feel like I’m retaining at least some principle, but I’ve been wavering in favor of Obama should the California primary be polled as very close. The thought of a Clinton in power for even the next four years is, like you say, repellent, so I’d once again be voting for the lesser of the evils. (I won’t have that problem in the general - I won’t have to vote at all, thanks to the Electoral College and the fact that California will go overwhelmingly Democratic.)

   February 3rd, 2008 at 4:25 am
2. 2
   Weldon Berger Says:
   

   Yeah, I still plan to vote for him on Tuesday since he seems to have a shot at knocking Clinton off. I just don’t want to write about him, or Clinton, anymore. It’s bad juju.

   February 3rd, 2008 at 5:41 am
3. 3
   Joe Says:
   

   So, I guess that ballot measure is dead there?

   February 3rd, 2008 at 6:58 am
4. 4
   Weldon Berger Says:
   

   Which ballot measure, Joe?

   February 3rd, 2008 at 7:52 am
5. 5
   Montfort Says:
   

   Maybe the one that would have split California’s electoral votes according to congressional districts? The winner of the district gets the vote. A way for Republicans to steal the election. That drive ran out of time and money.

   February 3rd, 2008 at 5:42 pm
6. 6
   Feeder of Felines Says:
   

   “So adios Barack and Hillary; wake me up when it’s over.”

   Well, I live in Texas, and therein voting third-party is a freebie for the time being. I don’t have to worry about what those of you in the swing states must, namely whether to vote for the D—whomever the R’s put up will win here, alas.

   I would vote for Kucinich, and I might have voted for Edwards, but I think this year I will vote third-party as I did in 2000 and 2004 (Nader, and then the Socialist Party, as a write-in, in honor of Eugene Debs, still the greatest socialist in the history of the US.)

   February 3rd, 2008 at 11:29 pm
7. 7
   Joe Says:
   

   Thanks M for the confirmation.

   February 4th, 2008 at 6:16 pm