Hillary Clinton is under fire for the role her 2008 primary campaign may have played in stoking rumors that Barack Obama was born in Kenya.
The former Washington bureau chief for McClatchy, for example, has implicated known sketchball and Clinton sycophant Sidney Blumenthal, who served as a “senior adviser” for Hillary’s campaign in 2008, in trying to get reporters to investigate the so-called “birther” rumor.
@HillaryClinton So why did your man #sidblumenthal spread the #obama birther rumor to me in 2008, asking us to investigate? Remember?
— James Asher (@jimasher) September 16, 2016
The news organization even sent a reporter to Africa to investigate, at Blumenthal’s urging.
Clinton 2008 sr adviser Sid Blumenthal pushed McClatchy so hard on birther story that they sent a reporter to Kenya.https://t.co/cuKqvVZfvh
— Phil Kerpen (@kerpen) September 17, 2016
Hillary later hired Blumenthal for a six-figure gig at the State Department after the Obama White House banned him from joining the administration (due to his shady, anti-Obama muckraking during the primaries). Embarrassing emails show that Hillary regularly corresponded with Blumenthal throughout her tenure as secretary of state.
There is literally no one who knows the name Sidney Blumenthal who, upon learning that he may have helped push a fringe conspiracy about Obama’s birthplace in an effort to help Hillary Clinton get elected president, would say to themselves, “That doesn’t sound like something he would do.”
This is hardly the only instance of Hillary Clinton and her campaign attempting to “other” Barack Obama during the 2008 Democratic primary, or in the words of a memo drafted by Clinton strategist Mark Penn, to portray Obama as someone “who is not at his center fundamentally American.”
Here are five times Hillary Clinton tried to “other” the man who beat her in 2008.
1) That time she wasn’t sure if Obama was a Muslim
Hillary awkwardly weighed in on the fringe rumor that Obama was a Muslim during a 60 Minutes interview, telling host Steve Kroft that there was “nothing to base that on,” before adding, somewhat ominously, “as far as I know.”
2) That time her campaign shared photos of Obama dressed like a Muslim
Hillary’s campaign did not exactly deny sharing photos of Obama dressed in traditional Somali garb during a visit to rural Kenya in 2006. In fact, when the Obama campaign accused Team Clinton of “shameful offensive fear-mongering,” her campaign fired back.
“If Barack Obama’s campaign wants to suggest that a photo of him wearing traditional Somali clothing is divisive, they should be ashamed,” Clinton campaign manager Maggie Williams said in a statement, while declining to say whether or not a Clinton staffer had circulated the photos.
3) That time she suggested he had ties to the terrorist group Hamas
Hillary Clinton did not hesitate to attack Barack Obama for his controversial associations with individuals such as the Reverend Jeremiah Wright and Louis Farrakhan. “These are problems, and they raise questions in people’s minds,” Hillary said during an April 2008 debate, while casually suggesting that Obama had ties to the leader of the terrorist group Hamas.
4) That time she touted her support among “hard-working … white Americans”
Hillary Clinton caused a firestorm in May 2008, shortly before she ended her candidacy, by arguing that she was a better candidate the Obama due to her support from “hard-working Americans, white Americans.”
Clinton lackey Paul Begala went on to suggest that Obama could never win the White House with a coalition of “eggheads and African-Americans.”
5) That time she suggested Obama could be assassinated
Several weeks after making those remarks about her support from “white Americans,” Hillary Clinton defended her decision to remain in the race for the nomination by saying: “We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated” in 1968 while running in the Democratic primary.
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