Obama adapts war room tactics to hit Clinton back

Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-Ill.) campaign has signaled in recent days it will hit back harder and more quickly to criticism from Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s (D-N.Y.) campaign, mirroring the rapid response efforts of President Bill Clinton’s 1992 war room.

Senior Obama officials have said they intend to respond to Clinton’s professed strategy of throwing the “kitchen sink” at the Illinois senator. And even though Obama supporters say they are still running a positive campaign, the responses have been more intense.

{mosads}“He’s a tough guy, and he’s going to respond appropriately,” Rep. Patrick Murphy (D-Pa.), an Obama supporter, said on a conference call Tuesday.

The Illinois senator began beefing up his own war room last fall, and the idea has become commonplace in presidential campaigns after the famous success of the Bill Clinton war room, which featured aides James Carville and George Stephanopoulos.

But Obama missed a chance at a knockout punch in last week’s Ohio and Texas primaries. Some said the campaign responded too slowly and too sloppily to the Clinton campaign’s attacks over an Obama adviser’s comments to the Canadian government regarding the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

Locked in the political fight of her life, Clinton and her campaign were quick to label the Obama campaign’s seemingly equivocating statements on the subject “NAFTA-gate.”

The Obama camp’s response was criticized as muddled and inaccurate, putting blood in the water for reporters who were being accused of not adequately “vetting” Obama.

But in the days that have followed, the Obama campaign has stepped up its rhetoric in the campaigns’ daily dueling conference calls with reporters.

In the early part of this week, the Obama campaign has responded forcefully to Clinton campaign charges that Obama has not “passed the commander-in-chief test,” and it also stayed on the offensive questioning Clinton’s foreign policy experience.

After Clinton scored points with her “Children” ad in Texas, featuring a sleeping child and the now-famous 3 a.m. phone call, the Obama campaign has not let any charge of foreign policy inexperience go by the wayside.

On Monday, the Obama campaign rolled out its top foreign policy advisers at a Washington press conference to detail their belief in Obama’s preparedness. On Tuesday, the campaign kicked off the now-daily skirmish with a memo and a conference call.

The memo, from former Clinton aide and current Obama supporter Greg Craig, detailed what the campaign says is evidence of Clinton’s lack of foreign policy experience. He used the Clinton charge of “just words” to describe her role in 1990s foreign policy discussions and decisions.

“As far as the record shows, Sen. Clinton never answered the phone … to make a decision on any pressing national security issue — not at 3 a.m. or at any other time of day,” Craig wrote in the memo.

Shortly after the morning conference call ended, Obama senior adviser David Axelrod was joined by communications director Bill Burton and supporter Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) to respond to controversial comments by Clinton supporter and ex-Rep. Geraldine Ferraro (D-N.Y.).

Ferraro, the 1984 Democratic vice presidential nominee and a current member of Clinton’s finance committee, said in a newspaper interview that if Obama were “a white man, he would not be in this position.”

“And if he was a woman [of any color] he would not be in this position,” Ferraro reportedly said. “He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.”{mospagebreak}

The comments were linked to the Drudge Report, and the Obama campaign moved to set up the early-afternoon conference call with Axelrod and Schakowsky. Axelrod pulled no punches.

The senior adviser said that the Clinton campaign has engaged in an “insidious pattern” of trotting out surrogates and campaign supporters who make “offensive” comments. He added that her camp doesn’t go far enough in reprimanding the surrogates or condemning the remarks at issue.

{mosads}“When you wink and nod at offensive statements, you’re really sending a signal to your supporters that anything goes,” Axelrod said.

Burton told The Hill Tuesday that the effort just seems “ramped up by the distortions coming from the Clinton campaign.”

“Our view is that we’re going to tell the truth about Sen. Obama’s record, and if we need to, we’re going to tell the truth about hers,” Burton said.

Howard Wolfson, Clinton’s spokesman, did not respond to a request for comment.

The Obama campaign underwent a similar controversy last week when a senior adviser called Clinton “a monster” in an interview. The adviser, Samantha Power, resigned within hours of the publication of the interview.

“We’ve been very firm in dealing with that,” Axelrod said.

Democratic strategist Steve Murphy, a former adviser to New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson’s presidential campaign, said Tuesday that the Obama campaign has shown in recent days that “they aren’t allowing any of her attacks to go unanswered.”

“The Obama campaign definitely is responding to every Clinton campaign attack now, [and] the question is whether the Obama folks will initiate any counter-attacks on a different subject,” Murphy said in an e-mail.

Campaigns face a difficult decision when deciding whether to respond to an opponent’s attack.

Acknowledging the criticism can sometimes backfire, giving a small spark the oxygen to cause a five-alarm media fire.

But the decision not to respond can haunt a losing candidate for days, months or years.

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), the 2004 Democratic nominee, repeatedly talks of the mistake his campaign made in not responding immediately to ads run by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

After Ohio and Texas, the Obama campaign has made it clear that nothing from the Clinton campaign will pass without a response and, probably, a conference call.

The Clinton campaign disputed the Obama camp’s characterization of its response in an e-mail from campaign manager Maggie Williams, saying that “we reject these false, personal and politically calculated attacks on the eve of a primary.”

Williams included a quote from Clinton earlier in the day: “I do not agree with that and you know it’s regrettable that any of our supporters on both sides say things that veer off into the personal. We ought to keep this focused on the issues. That’s what this campaign should be about.”