Cross Posted on Daily Kos 

One of the biggest recent flaps between Clinton and Obama has been Obama’s statement a while back in which he said, in part, that the GOP was the party of ideas. Clinton has seized on this statement to try to gain an advantage on Obama, and we’ll see whether she’s successful in that endavor. Obama, on the other hand, has countered saying that she’s taking the quote out of context and he didn’t mean anything like what Clinton is suggesting.

The problem is that they both have a problem.

Let’s start with Obama’s claim that Clinton is taking his quote out of context. Here is Obama’s full quote:

The Republican approach, I think, has played itself out. I mean, I think it’s fair to say that the Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time there for the last 10-15 years, in the sense that they were challenging conventional wisdom. Now, you’ve heard it all before. You look at the economic policies when they’re being debated among the [GOP] presidential candidates, it’s all tax cuts. You know, we’ve done that. We’ve tried it. That’s not really going to solve our energy problems, for example.

Clinton’s insinuations that Obama may support those ideas now is clearly off base as Obama has said that we’ve tried the GOP’s ideas and they haven’t worked. That’s pretty easy to look at.

But Obama has a problem as well, and several of them, all of which may be worse than Clinton’s misrepresentation of what Obama said.

First off, this is another instance of Obama repeating a right wing frame (Social Security in crisis, anyone?).

The very phrase “the party of ideas” was developed by the GOP because the very phrase itself insinuated that the Democrats was the party that didn’t have ideas. Repeating this frame by itself does nothing good. If he had said “the GOP is supposedly the party of ideas” or “The GOP liked to call themselves the party of ideas” or some other way to qualify it to clearly show that he didn’t really believe the statement, then it would be different, but he didn’t.

Second, not only did he didn’t do anything to show that he disagreed with the statement but…he actually DID agree with it! He says they’re bad ideas, yes, but he basically is saying that the Democratic party’s ideas have been crap for the past decade and a half. Really? Did he sleep through the entire Clinton presidency? I’m not sure that basically calling Democratic ideas in the 90s crap is the best way to win over democratic voters.

Thirdly, Obama gives credence to the GOP’s ideas by referring to them as “the party of ideas,” whether he agrees with them or not. And in fact, he really only half-heartedly disagrees with them. It’s kinda like “well yeah, they had ideas, but unfortunately they didn’t work, so we should try something new now.”

In other words, he is arguing that they were bad ideas through the argument that, over time, they haven’t panned out, not because they are just flat out bad ideas.

My issue with Clinton’s attacks are that she’s using the right phrase but attacking in the wrong way. There were basically two ways to attack: the more correct attack, such as what I outlined and the shall we say the less than honest attack, but an attack which, if it worked, would probably do a lot more damage to Obama.

She choose to do the latter, and it’s effectiveness has yet to be seen. If she ends up rolling over Obama on February 5th, we can probably say that it did no worse than having no effect. The problem Clinton has is that if Obama effectively pushes back on her attack, she can’t easily go back and attack him using the same phrase using the other method because people will think it’s just the same attack.

Clinton definitely has a problem in this line of attack, but I think Obama supporters should listen to themselves before going too far in saying “Obama’s right! The GOP WAS the party of ideas!”