Obama Camp Ratchets Up Attacks on Clinton

By Jonathan Weisman
PORTLAND, Ore. -- The Obama campaign fired off what may be its most aggressive broadside yet on Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's honesty this morning, with campaign manager David Plouffe issuing a diatribe on what they called her "history of misleading voters," then declaring on a conference call, "The American people simply are not going to elect someone who they think are not honest and trustworthy."

While Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) increasingly focuses his attention on presumptive Republican nominee John McCain, Obama's campaign staff has only ratcheted up its assault on Clinton (D-N.Y.). For the second day running, they have called conference calls to hash out their interpretations of thousands of pages of then-First Lady Clinton's White House schedules, then taunted the press for not doing more with them.

Greg Craig, an Obama foreign policy adviser and President Bill Clinton's former impeachment lawyer, said European newspapers have drawn stark conclusions from the calendar notations, specifically that she had no meaningful role in bringing peace to Northern Ireland, opening the borders of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia or seeking reconciliation in Rwanda.

But Plouffe, still smarting from his candidate's loss in Ohio, fired the toughest broadside at Clinton on her role in the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement, noting her presence at a meeting called "for the sole reason" of "cheerleading NAFTA's passage." Clinton's accusations that Obama secretly supported the trade deal were a central theme of her campaign in Ohio.

Mocking Clinton's calls for revotes in Michigan and Florida, Plouffe said, the "only do-over election we might want to consider is in Ohio, where she misled the voters."

In truth, the antiseptic calendar records released this week can only say so much. They may tell the world where Clinton was on a certain day, but they cannot attest to what she was doing or saying in meetings and events.