Hillary in flop sweat–using good cop, bad cop tactics on Obama. Why did the press wait until now to print the wrinkled hag photo of Hillary?

By Mick Gregory

Hillary Clinton’s campaign bus has had one wheel fall off and is on its way to rolling over in a ditch along an Iowa farm-to-market road. The national biased polls that her campaign chooses to publish, aren’t even looking much better.

The real, unfiltered look at Hillary. Why was this the first photo in focus? Is it because the liberal press sees a loser?

That’s why Hillary has had some of her campaign people threaten to turn on Obama with stories about drug use. Then Hillary comes on the air (after the smear was delivered) and says “I will not bring up negative dirt on my opponents.”

But she already did! Hillary had her highly paid specialists do it for her and she kept repeating the incident, drawing more attention to it! That was all part of the plan. It’s called “good cop, bad cop.”

The notion that she has a post-Iowa “firewall” in New Hampshire is more propaganda. In fact, she is in danger of losing all four early contests, including Nevada and South Carolina to Sen. Barack Obama, who is now the Democrat frontrunner. Next, her husband sets expectations lower by saying “It will be a miracle if Hillary wins in Iowa!”

That’s PR spin for setting the bar lower, so that when Obama wins, the media will report that Hillary did surprising well and that “it was not a knockout punch for Obama.”
“This is still Hillary’s race, this was just a scratch.”

This Sunday, the NY Times sees that Hillary is a lost cause–so they are going to drop the bomb with an expose on her illegal campaign donations and list of donors to the Clinton Library.

Update: that came out and passed without much a blip. But the Obama surge gains momentum.

BOB KERREY (A Hillary Supporter): “It’s something by the way I have told Barack Obama when I’ve met with him. It something that I’ve spoken about before. So this is not something that just sort of came out of the head birth out there in Iowa. I’ve thought about it a great deal. I’ve watched the blogs try to say that you can’t trust him because he spent a little bit of time in a secular madrassa. I feel quite the opposite. I feel it’s a tremendous strength whether he is in the United States Senate or whether he’s in the White House, I think it’s a tremendous asset for him.

That is a pretty good hit against Obama. Very underhanded.

Watch Hillary pull more last-chance dirty news drops on Obama during the Christmas holidays. Of course, Hillary will say she had noting to do with it. And the mainstream media will not be reporting the behind the scenes strategy. You will need to read blogs for that.

It’s too late. Now the Washington Post has joined the wolf pack with Hillary’s “hangdog” photo.

The hangdog candidate photograph is a weapon in the war of attrition. They are easily gathered, because no politician can be completely upbeat every day of every week for two years of solid campaigning. All it takes is one tired moment, one puffy-eyed, early-morning, haven’t-had-the-coffee-yet photograph, and the image is in the arsenal. Even better is if the candidate lets down his or her guard momentarily in the presence of another candidate, so that, say, Barack Obama can be seen looking happy and confident as Hillary Clinton looks tired and depressed in the same frame.

In the partisan media (much of the blogosphere, the tabloids and several cable channels), these images are used freely and gleefully. In media that strive for objectivity, the hangdog shot raises difficult issues. In an earlier age of newspapering, sorting through the archives for an image that confirmed your headline was acceptable practice. Today, serious newspapers try to use images from the most recent campaign events rather than something a few months old, even if it fits the story line better.