Dem Shoes in the Closet

Barack Obama hits Hillary back on the issue of ethics, challenging her to release her tax returns. Presumably she and Bill have some associations of their own they'd rather not discuss just yet. Then there's the issue of the delay in releasing Hillary's papers from the White House years.

Quite a pair, these Dem contenders. He has Rezko, she has Hsu, and perhaps whoever's paying Bill to speak. He has his lovely Hyde Park real estate deal, she has Whitewater and her killing in cattle futures. He has his friendship with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers and wife Bernadine Dohrn, she has Bill's pardon of Puerto Rican domestic terrorists. He has the Davis law firm, she has the Rose law firm billing records.

The Clinton team plan the endgame. NY Times:

“This is not a question of trying to damage somebody — this is a question of trying to fully understand all the particular aspects of each of the candidates,” Mr. Ickes said. “There’s not another shoe in her closet to drop. It is clear that too much is yet unknown about Senator Obama.”

Cute. Lots of shoes. Shoes on the brain. Out, out Dem shoes. Clinton communications director Howard Wolfson quoted in The Politico:

Wolfson asserted the Clinton campaign faced more scrutiny over — and was also more proactive and forthcoming in dealing with — its own troubled fundraiser, Norman Hsu (alternately pronounced “soo” or “shoe”), a fugitive convicted on grand theft charges years ago. The campaign gave to charity $23,000 contributed by Hsu and identified and returned more than $800,000 in contributions he bundled for Clinton.

“I can guarantee you that if the shoe were on the other foot, so to speak, no pun intended,” Wolfson said, “I would have been getting those calls, those questions, left and right, and having to come up with answers that were satisfactory to a very serious and dogged press corps.”

Meanwhile, Obama's Axelrod (seen in above pix) gets ominous. NY Observer:

SAN ANTONIO, Texas—At the end of another day on which Barack Obama failed to deliver the coup de grace to Hillary Clinton’s White House hopes, the Illinois senator spoke to supporters here at an event that was notable mainly for its tepidity.

The crowd was startlingly small, numbering perhaps 1500. Obama often attracts crowds ten times as large. His speech was brief—it lasted barely ten minutes—and featured few of the oratorical fireworks for which he is known. [snip]

Obama’s chief strategist David Axelrod hinted to reporters that the senator may now become more aggressive toward the Clinton team and might beginning raising questions about the ethics of Hillary and Bill Clinton.

When I asked Axelrod whether the apparent effectiveness of the Former First Lady’s more negative tone in recent days posed a problem for Obama, he responded: “If Senator Clinton wants to take the debate to various places, we’ll join that debate. We’ll do it on our own terms and we’ll do it in our own way. But if she wants to make issues like ethics and disclosure and law firms and real estate deals and all that sort of stuff issues, I don’t know why they’d want to go there.”

By all means, quite a roadmap. Let's go on. His foreign policy experience consists of living overseas when he was six and majoring in international relations--oh and a good will tour of Africa. Plus rubbing elbows with a professorial PLO operative and donor to his campaign and recipient of a donation from a foundation when Obama served on the board. Hers is going on lots of goodwill tours all around the world.

And as far as governance--neither has ever run anything successfully other than a political campaign, nor have they any major record of accomplishment.

Robert Novak, the political veteran:

Clinton's transformation of the political climate by her decisive victory in Ohio and unexpected narrow win in Texas coincided with Obama facing adversity for the first time in his magical candidacy, and not handling it well.

Yes. Can he overcome his naive radicalism? Or is he just too hardcore, angry Left and self-absorbed to imagine a mainstream American point of view? An ambitious ingenue in his 40's.

UPDATE: Tom at The Bench reports Obama gets the FARC terrorist endorsement.

UPDATE: Tribune sets the stage for the trial. Their daily trial blog here. Sun Times:

Once, he rubbed elbows with politicians like U.S. Sen. Barack Obama and Gov. Blagojevich. He traveled overseas for months at a time, sealing multimillion-dollar business deals. The wealthy and powerful would pack his mansion in Wilmette for fund-raising galas.

Now, if friends and family want to see him, they do so from a courtroom bench. Obama has very publicly moved to purge his campaign chest of money donated by Rezko or otherwise tied to him.

The latest "purge" was as recently as January, followed by the revelation that Rezko toured Obama's house with him pre-purchase, and the news that a shadowy Iraqi financier allegedly linked to the Oil for Food scandal in Saddam's Iraq provided the money to Rezko used to purchase the lot adjoining Obama's. The looming trial already forced some shoes to drop--who knows what else could come tumbling out. There are still unanswered questions.

UPDATE: Chicago, "where politics is conducted with crowbars"? NY Times, Lesson of Defeat: Obama Comes Out Punching:

“She’s made the argument that she’s thoroughly vetted, in contrast to me,” Mr. Obama said to reporters aboard his campaign plane. “I think it’s important to examine that argument.”

Over the last year, though, Mr. Obama has struggled to deliver that examination. He picks up the cudgel, and then sets it down. The problem is that Mr. Obama has built a campaign persona as the man of hope, a young candidate with oratorical skills who promises to build bridges across the ideological divide.

If he indulges his inner Chicago pol, formed in a city where politics is conducted with crowbars, he risks taking the shine off. But his advisers say he has little choice.

RCP Blog Daily 2008, and commentary on whether more debates are the answer here. New Rezko site, Rezkorama. HT Hugh Hewitt, who gets a comment from Hitchens on this:

HH: Barack Obama will inevitably be offered the second position, unless the Rezko thing is even worse than we think. If he’s drawn in…

CH: It got a lot worse, I think, since Mrs. Clinton so ineptly raised it the first time, because of the appearance on the scene of this very dubious Iraqi, Mr. Nadhmi Auchi…sorry, for your listeners who want to Google him, Auchi, first name Nadhmi. I’m doing a bit of work on him myself, but what can be found out by anyone is pretty shady. And he suddenly gives a huge trench of money across the Atlantic to the man who provided the Obama family’s mortgage.

UDPATE: Obamauchi: Oil for Food.

Related posts: Michelle Profile, Ban-Happy Obama Culture, McCain Clinches, Dem Disarray