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New Clinton Ad Prompts Reply From Obama

By Katharine Q. Seelye

WACO, Tex. — Playing on anxieties about national security, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has produced a “red phone moment” advertisement that suggests she would be better able to respond to a crisis than Senator Barack Obama.

“It’s 3 a.m. and your children are safe and asleep,” says a narrator as threatening music surges over dark black-and-white images.

There’s a world crisis and the White House phone is ringing. “Your vote will decide who answers that call,” the narrator says. “Whether it’s someone who already knows the world’s leaders, knows the military — someone tested and ready to lead in a dangerous world.”

It ends with a photo of Mrs. Clinton wearing glasses and picking up the phone.

Mr. Obama, responding to the ad during a stop in Houston, said it raised “a perfectly legitimate question.”

But, he said: “We’ve seen these ads before. They’re the kind that play on people’s fears to try to scare up votes.”

Later the Obama campaign released a new ad to respond directly to the one from Mrs. Clinton’s campaign. It says in part: “It’s 3 a.m. and your children are safe and asleep. But there’s a phone ringing in the White House. Something’s happening in the world. When that call gets answered, shouldn’t the president be the one — the only one — who had judgment and courage to oppose the Iraq war from the start.”

The commercial concluded, “In a dangerous world, it’s judgment that matters.”

Mrs. Clinton followed the ad with a blistering indictment of Mr. Obama’s qualifications to serve as commander in chief, saying he had been “missing in action” at several important moments.

While Mr. Obama has said that his opposition in 2002 to the Iraq war showed that he had better judgment than she had, she belittled that opposition as a mere speech at a time when he did not have the responsibility to vote on the war.

“There’s a big difference between delivering a speech at an anti-war rally as a state senator and picking up that phone at 3 a.m. in the morning and dealing with an international crisis,” she declared, standing on a stage here with military veterans and a gigantic American flag behind her.

Despite his speech, she said, “by 2004, he was saying he wasn’t sure how he would have voted,” and by the time he got to the United States Senate, “he voted exactly as I did.”

She said he was “missing in action” on the recent Senate vote on Iran and missing in action as chairman of a subcommittee responsible for NATO policy in Afghanistan.

In his stop in Houston, Mr. Obama highlighted his opposition in 2002 to the war in Iraq, which he cites as an example in which his judgment was wiser than that of Mrs. Clinton, who voted for the war. (Mr. Obama was not in the Senate at the time and did not vote on the matter.)

“In fact, we have had a red phone moment,” Mr. Obama said. “It was the decision to invade Iraq. And Senator Clinton gave the wrong answer, George Bush gave the wrong answer, John McCain gave the wrong answer.”

The Clinton campaign highlighted Mr. Obama’s acknowledgment that the ad raised a legitimate question and defended it in a conference call with reporters who asked if it was not the kind of fear-mongering that the Clinton campaign had condemned.

Mark Penn, Mrs. Clinton’s pollster and top strategist, said the ad did not say that Mr. Obama was unqualified but rather that it gave voters a choice. “People have seen both candidates, they’ve heard their experience,” he said, adding that “voters have made judgments on this.”

Mr. Penn suggested that Mr. Obama’s speech against the Iraq war “at an anti-war rally” hardly qualified him to be commander-in-chief.

“The question really is, who’s going to have the wisdom, strength, going forward to make the decisions that have to be made?” he said.

Polls continue to suggest that while voters prefer Mr. Obama as president, they still believe that Mrs. Clinton is a stronger leader.

Asked what kind of crises had tested Mrs. Clinton, her team cited her service on the Armed Services Committee, her trip to China when she said women’s rights are human rights, and her support from various military officers.

Mr. Obama’s advisers weighed whether to have him address the ad directly himself. If he did, they asked themselves, would he be giving credibility to the charge? But if he didn’t, they said, it might appear that he was ceding ground on national security.

While Mr. Obama has been trying to talk less about Mrs. Clinton and more about Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, aides decided to have him respond to the ad himself, on camera. So he discussed it before beginning a meeting with veterans at an American Legion Post in Houston.

Mr. Penn in the Clinton camp said that he was “curious” why the Obama campaign decided to have Mr. Obama respond to the ad himself, suggesting it showed his campaign was super-sensitive about the issue of his readiness.

Source:  New York Times

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