The Obama campaign and the mainstream media tell us that Hillary Clinton has been running a negative campaign. They insist that her continued presence in this race is damaging the Democratic Party. They have even taken to calling her the "Tonya Harding" of election strategists.
Have we all forgotten Vote Different, the video that started it all?
This was the ad that launched Barack Obama's campaign and was at the heart of his earliest recruiting efforts. It is the ad that best exemplifies what he and his campaign have truly been about.
Yes, supposedly, it was created by an independent source. Obama, however, never renounced it. He merely laughed it off as the creation of an overly enthusiastic supporter.
Hillary Clinton as "Big Brother"? Obama as the slayer of this oppressive overlord? This was no subtle statement, but Barack Obama allowed its venomous message of generational-warfare to spread until it had built for him his now-solid base of angry, cynical, Clinton-hating support.
In that ad, the hammer that smashes Hillary Clinton in the face and causes her image to explode has been far more damaging to the long-term interests of the Democratic Party than that crowbar was to Nancy Kerrigan's kneecaps.
And yet the mainstream media -- led most notoriously by MSNBC's Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann -- continues to perpetuate the myth that Obama has run a campaign built on such concepts as hope and unity. "Hope" and "unity" are not enough to sell a first-term Senator with so few accomplishments. No. Cynicism and divisiveness have much greater appeal. Ask Orwell. It is with this cynicism and divisiveness that the Obama campaign has fueled itself -- while simultaneously and disingenuously portraying itself as the bringer of a new kind of politics. (For further evidence of this, visit AttackTimeline.com)
The irony is that it is now Barack Obama who occupies that Orwellian screen, and it is his supporters who now sit captive in the audience. Perhaps Hillary Clinton has a good hammer-throw left in her yet.
Should, however, Barack Obama indeed win the Democratic nomination -- and when he then loses to John McCain in the general election -- let us remember how his campaign was born and what his message truly was.