The camp gained a new spokesman on Thursday when Joe Andrew, a superdelegate who was a chairman of the Democratic National Committee under President Bill Clinton, switched his support to Mr. Obama from Mrs. Clinton. Mr. Andrew accused Mrs. Clinton and her allies of being “the best practitioners of the old politics,” who “will use the exact words that Republicans used to attack me when I was defending President Clinton.”
Asked in an interview on Thursday about the Andrew defection and the dirty fighter implication, Mrs. Clinton simply shook her head and said: “I don’t know where that comes from. I think it’s just part of the mythology that’s been manufactured and promoted.”
I'll tell you where it came from. Watching you.
Ruthlessness and Grit Seen in Clinton’s Style
By MARK LEIBOVICH and KATE ZERNIKE
JEFFERSONVILLE, Ind. — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is waving her fists across Indiana, signing autographs on boxing gloves.
“We need a president who’s a fighter again,” Mrs. Clinton said at a rally on Thursday, adding that the next president must understand what it is like to “get knocked down and get back up: that’s the story of America, right?”
In recent days, Mrs. Clinton has chided the experts for “counting me out” and Senator Barack Obama for his inability to “close the deal” and declared that no one was going to make her quit. “She makes Rocky Balboa look like a pansy,” North Carolina’s governor, Michael F. Easley, said in endorsing her, and a union leader in Portage, Ind., praised her “testicular fortitude.”
This kind of language and pugilistic imagery, however, also evokes the baggage that makes Mrs. Clinton such a provocative political figure. For as much as a willingness to “do what it takes” and “die hard” are marketable commodities in politics, they can also yield to less flattering qualities, plenty of which have been ascribed to her over the years. Just as supporters praise her “toughness” and “tenacity,” critics also describe her as “divisive,” “a dirty fighter” or “willing to do anything to win.”
The critics include supporters of Mr. Obama who subscribe to the notion, pushed by their candidate, that Mrs. Clinton, his opponent in the race for the Democratic nomination, represents the fractious politics of the past.
Delicious
Digg
Reddit
Newsvine
Furl
Google
Yahoo
