And now for the completely fresh approach, a Bonaparate maneuver, hit 'em where they ain't, Mrs. C goes to China and joins the Dalai Clique.
Clinton turns to China bashing
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Robert Lusetich, Los Angeles correspondent | May 05, 2008
HILLARY Clinton, seeking to make China as important an election issue as Iraq, has launched her most vicious attack on Beijing as she tries to comfort the US working class ahead of this week's Democratic primary elections.
With Indiana and North Carolina headed to the polls on Wednesday, Senator Clinton sought to strengthen her position with primarily white lower-income earners by blaming China, which holds almost 20 per cent of US debt, for the loss of manufacturing jobs and the decline of the US currency.
"We do have to get tough on China," she said yesterday while campaigning in North Carolina, which has seen a loss of more than 200,000 factory jobs since 2001. "It is long past time for us to blow the whistle."
"This country manipulates its currency to our disadvantage, they engage in broad-based intellectual property theft, industrial espionage, they do not follow the rules they agreed to follow when they joined the WTO. What do we get in return from them? Well, we get tainted pet food, we get lead-laced toys, we get polluted pharmaceuticals."
With polls showing the economy has now surpassed the war in Iraq as the primary concern of voters, the Clinton campaign has ratcheted up its China bashing in recent weeks, despite Bill Clinton's leading role in championing China's entry into the global economy when he was president.
Senator Clinton has made China the international bogeyman, calling on President George W.Bush to boycott the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics in August as a protest against China's policies in Tibet and Sudan.
"I'm the only candidate who isn't just talking about cracking down on China but I have a specific plan on how to do it," she told unionists last month. "China should be our trade partner, not our trade master."
She has called for trade sanctions and other punitive measures. But her hard line on China has not sat well with everyone in her campaign.
Richard Baum, a political science professor at the Centre for Chinese Studies at UCLA, resigned as her adviser because of what he called "gratuitous China bashing" and "grossly misguided accusations".
"As a lifelong Democrat, it saddens me that Senator Clinton has chosen to take the low road in her effort to gain our party's presidential nomination," Professor Baum said in an email to the website Politico.
However, the message resonates with a section of the community that sees Senator Clinton, an Ivy League-educated lawyer and multi-millionaire, as a champion of the oppressed.
She will be hoping that her bond with the white working class can keep her presidential bid alive.
Even her own advisers, including James Carville, conceded that Indiana was a must-win state and after being in a dead-heat with frontrunner Barack Obama, polls now give her a slight edge.
After Senator Obama's worst week of his campaign - polls show he was wounded by the re-emergence of his racially divisive former pastor, Jeremiah Wright - his double-digit lead in North Carolina slipped below 10percentage points and he faces the prospect of surrendering Indiana.
Indiana is pivotal because the Democratic Party super delegates - officials and apparatchiks - want to see Senator Obama win over traditional Democratic bases, such as factory workers.
Indiana has not voted for a Democrat in a presidential race since Lyndon Johnson, but its proximity to Senator Obama's home state of Illinois and its wealth of independents makes it important for his candidacy.
Victory for Senator Clinton in Indiana will reinforce her argument that only she can deliver the poor whites in a battle against Republican John McCain.
As Senator Obama will almost certainly have the lead in both popular vote and delegates after the primaries, Senator Clinton must convince the supers to give her their votes. The idea was a long shot a month ago but it is gaining traction.
Senator Obama received some good news yesterday when he won the Guam caucuses - albeit by only seven votes, 2264 to 2257 - over Senator Clinton. They will each get seven delegates from the Pacific island territory whose residents can't even vote in the general election.
While Senator Clinton was tearing into China, Senator Obama implored voters to look beyond the superficial elements of this race and focus on the big-picture issues.
"The only way (I) can win this race (is) if you decide that you've had enough of the way things are; if you decide that this election is bigger than flag pins and sniper fire and the comments of a former pastor, bigger than the differences between what we look like or where we come from or what party we belong to," he told a rally in Indianapolis.
Senator Clinton had been looking for a good omen in yesterday's running of the Kentucky Derby. She sent her daughter, Chelsea, to Churchill Downs with orders to bet on Eight Belles, seeking to become only the fourth filly to win the US's biggest horse race.
But if there were omens, they were bad, as Eight Belles, after finishing a gallant second to Big Brown, broke her two front fetlocks soon after crossing thefinish line and had to be euthanased.
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