The Clinton Threat To Britain

Peter Oborne writes:

There has only been one subject of conversation in Washington DC where I have been all week: the increasingly brutal contest for the Democratic nomination between Hillary Clinton and her much younger and less experienced adversary, Barack Obama.

Barring a massive upset, the Republican nomination is now decided in favour of John McCain, but it is still impossible to predict with any confidence who will be the Democrats' choice.

In theory, this year's election ought to be a most uplifting contest: an unusually tight race between a brilliant man who would be the first black president of the U.S., and an extraordinary figure who would be the first woman occupant of the White House.

And yet it is not. The fight over the Democratic nomination - the apparent detente during the TV head-to-head debate on Thursday notwithstanding - could hardly be nastier or more demeaning.

The emergence of Barack Obama as a serious contender over the last six weeks has coincided with some of the most revolting politics that America (not celebrated for the purity of its public life) has ever seen.

This viciousness is not, however, the fault of Barack Obama.

It has come, without exception, from the friends and supporters of Hillary Clinton.

Only eight weeks ago, the Clinton camp was still insisting that it was going to fight a clean campaign. Terry McAuliffe, Hillary's campaign chairman, said: "We're going to stay positive. We're not going to attack our fellow Democrats."

He could afford to make this lofty pronouncement while his candidate was still comfortably ahead in the polls, and seemingly en route to the White House.

But the sudden emergence of Obama (who appeared to have faltered badly last autumn) ahead of the Iowa caucus changed all that.

He has been assailed with a powerfully orchestrated series of smears about alleged financial corruption, his racial origins, his inexperience and his juvenile drug-taking.

Most loathsome of all, his opponents have also deliberately drawn attention to his strong Muslim connections.

In a profoundly ignorant country such as the U.S., which ever since the 9/11 atrocity has had a tendency to assume that all Muslims are terrorists, this was a particularly calculated and nasty smear.

In the majority of cases, Hillary Clinton has chosen not to make these attacks herself but in each case, the jibes can be traced back to her supporters.

During the New Hampshire primary, which the Clinton camp needed to win at all costs in order to reverse its setback in Iowa, a series of false statements were put out concerning Obama's record on abortion law, suggesting that his commitment to women's rights was half-hearted.

The perpetrators of this deceit must have known that they were misrepresenting Obama's record, but that did not stop them.

Nastiest of all were a series of remarks made to the Washington Post by former Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey, an avowed Clinton supporter.

"I like the fact that his name is Obama, and that his father was a Muslim and that his paternal grandfather is a Muslim," he said, going on to state that Obama had been educated at a secular madrasah.

"I feel that's a tremendous strength," he said with acid innuendo.

It seems clear that Kerrey's remarks were deliberately made to draw attention in a damaging way to Obama's Muslim connections.

The Clinton camp has also leapt on Obama's admission in his autobiography that he took drugs as a very young man.

There have been hints, absurd but nevertheless damaging, that he may even have dealt in drugs.

Hillary Clinton herself went on to the attack with the claim that when Obama practised law in Chicago, he once represented an inner city slum landlord.

As ever, she was putting an entirely malicious construction on the innocent and even admirable fact that Obama had worked for just five hours with a church group linked with the individual in question on some charitable project.

The commander-in-chief of this unsavoury campaign is, of course, Bill Clinton.

The former president has been unleashed as an attack dog on behalf of his wife, as old campaigners recall her doing on occasions when he was in the White House in the 1990s.

This policy of denigration has appalled many Democrats. Robert Reich, Clinton's former Oxford roommate and Labour Secretary in his first administration, declared that it was "demeaning for a former president to say things that are patently untrue".

Meanwhile, the viciousness of the assault was instrumental in forcing Senator Ted Kennedy out into the open as a supporter of Obama.

Most impressive of all, however, has been the testimony from Dick Morris, the political consultant who has the reputation of twice saving Bill Clinton's political career (first when he ceased to be governor of Arkansas in the early 1980s, and later when the presidency ran into deep trouble).

It should be borne in mind that Morris is a deeply flawed character, who has fallen out bitterly with the Clintons.

But nobody understands the couple better - and this is what he had to say in an article in the New York Post earlier this week.

"For more than 30 years, no one has been able to stop Bill and Hillary Clinton from routinely acting on their shared base instinct to annihilate anyone who gets in their way, in whatever way it takes, however long it takes, whatever it costs - and then to enjoy watching their targets suffer.

"After successfully employing their slash and burn tactics for years, they have come to believe that their reprehensible politics are justified, even necessary."

Morris went on: "In Washington, Arkansas and recently in South Carolina, the Clintons have used whatever slimy tactics they felt they needed - ruining reputations, invading the privacy of their targets by dispatching private detectives to comb their records, lying about their opponents."

Despite this powerful testimony, Hillary Clinton's unpleasant tactics seem to be succeeding. She remains ahead in the polls and her message, that Obama is flaky and cannot be trusted, is sinking in with voters.

Many ordinary Democrats I have spoken to insist that they will vote for Hillary rather than Obama because they think she is more capable of dealing with the economic crisis that, along with the Iraq war, are the principal legacies of George W. Bush.

We will know a great deal more in three days' time after "Super Tuesday" - the most important day in the Democratic nomination battle when approximately half of all the delegates are elected.

At the moment, the most highly-rated observers seem to believe the power of the Clinton machine will win her the Democratic nomination.

I do hope they are wrong. This is one of the most significant elections in the history of the USA.

The reputation of this magnificent country has rarely been as low as it is today thanks, in large part, to the terrible error of the Iraq war and the human rights abuses that have accompanied it.

It is true that Hillary Clinton is a more accomplished politician than her rival.

During Thursday's TV debate, she was the more impressive figure. Obama tends to get flustered and cram too much detail into his answers.

Yet he is a man who inspires hope. He took the courageous stand of opposing the Iraq invasion five years ago, when practically the entire U.S. political establishment supported it.

Incidentally, this is yet another area where the Clinton smear machine has been at work, falsely claiming that Obama's well-documented opposition to the war was a "fairytale".

But the overwhelming reason to admire Obama is that his candidacy represents a move away from the tired and ugly politics of character assassination which has dominated the U.S. ever since Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992.

It was not just Clinton who practised these cynical politics. So did his successor, George W. Bush, who possessed his own master of the dark arts, Karl Rove.

And, of course, these poisonous tactics spread across the Atlantic. New Labour studied at the feet of the Clintons - one of the main reasons for the culture of deception and smear under Alastair Campbell which dominated Downing Street during the Blair decade.

It is no coincidence that Hillary Clinton's political strategist, Mark Penn, was an important adviser to Tony Blair in the Labour Party election campaign of 2005.

Barack Obama, 46, seems capable of offering a desperately needed decency to U.S. politics.

Although sometimes rattled by the Clinton attacks (he is said to have cut Hillary dead when they both attended Mr Bush's State of the Union address earlier this week), he has not responded in kind - despite there being no shortage of damaging material on the Clintons.

It would be desperately sad if the moral squalor of the Clinton machine prevails.

This matters not just for America but for the health of Western politics. Never has American democracy been as sick as it is today - and, I believe, only Barack Obama offers hope of bringing it back to health.