Obama camp: Clinton has ‘history of misleading voters’

The campaigns of Democratic presidential hopefuls Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) and Barack Obama (Ill.) sparred Friday over which candidate is more deceptive in dealing with voters.

The Obama campaign used the recently released Clinton White House schedules to argue that the New York senator has not been forthcoming about her role in the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement, while the former first lady’s camp accused Obama of hypocrisy on the NAFTA issue.

{mosads}Phil Singer, a Clinton spokesman, countered that Obama displayed “a lot of chutzpah” by saying that Clinton was not honest about her role in NAFTA in the mid-1990s after accounts surfaced earlier this month that a senior Obama adviser had told Canadian officials that the Illinois senator’s tough talk on the controversial trade agreement was just political posturing.

At the same time, Bill Burton, an Obama spokesman, cited polling data in a morning memo, suggesting that voters do not view Clinton as an honest politician but that they do view presumptive Republican nominee Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) as relatively trustworthy.

“Honesty is a crucial metric in this race because the Democratic nominee is going to be running against John McCain, who is viewed by voters as one of the most trustworthy politicians in America,” Burton wrote.

The Clinton campaign also charged that the Obama campaign was responsible for circulating a picture showing former President Bill Clinton with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s controversial longtime pastor.

“Well, President Clinton took tens of thousands of photos during his eight years as president. Stop the presses,” the Clinton campaign said in a memo.

It also asserted that the Obama camp was suggesting that the former first lady’s campaign had suggested that Clinton might have had some part in the recent dust-up over two State Department employees who accessed Obama’s personal passport files without authorization.

Singer, on a conference call with reporters, characterized the suggestion as “a reckless charge that has zero merit.”

The Clinton campaign has taken advantage of recent shifts in polling to say that Obama is falling because he is just starting to be “vetted and tested.”

The Obama campaign, however, said that Clinton might have been tested and vetted, but voters have found her to be dishonest.

“Sen. Clinton likes to claim that she’s been vetted,” Burton wrote in a memo. “But there is a salient theme emerging that has not been examined at all in this race: Sen. Clinton has consistently made political calculations to deliberately mislead the American people, and the voters have noticed.”