Obama campaign accuses Clinton
camp in photo controversy
Monday, February 25th 2008, 3:05 PM
AP2006 photo of Sen. Barack Obama in traditional Somali
garb is at the center of a new political controversy.
Barack Obama's campaign accused rival Hillary Clinton's campaign of engaging in the "most shameful, offensive fear-mongering we've seen from either party" in the presidential election for reportedly circulating a photo of the Illinois senator wearing traditional African clothes.
The photo of Obama dressed as a Somali elder during a visit to Wajir, Kenya in 2006 appeared Monday morning on the Drudge Report website under the headline, "Clinton staffers circulate 'dressed' Obama."
Obama's campaign manager, David Plouffe, responded swiftly and harshly to the Clinton campaign's apparent decision to circulate the photo. For months, Obama, the son of black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas, has been dogged by false Internet-fueled rumors that he is a Muslim.
"On the very day that Senator Clinton is giving a speech about restoring respect for America in the world, her campaign has engaged in the most shameful, offensive fear-mongering we've seen from either party in this election," Plouffe said in a statement.
"This is part of a disturbing pattern that led her county chairs to resign in Iowa, her campaign chairman to resign in New Hampshire, and it's exactly the kind of divisive politics that turns away Americans of all parties and diminishes respect for America in the world," Plouffe said.
The Clinton campaign did not deny circulating the photo but suggested Team Obama should be ashamed for describing the photo as divisive.
"If Barack Obama's campaign wants to suggest that a photo of him wearing traditional Somali clothing is divisive, they should be ashamed," Clinton's campaign manager, Maggie Williams, replied. "Hillary Clinton has worn the traditional clothing of countries she has visited and had those photos published widely."
"This is nothing more than an obvious and transparent attempt to distract from the serious issues confronting our country today and to attempt to create the very divisions they claim to decry," Williams said.
Clinton aides said there are more than 700 staffers who work for the campaign and they could neither confirm nor deny whether anyone from the staff sent out the photo.
"If the point here that someone on our staff was making is that the press covers us differently than they cover Sen. Obama, then we don't aruge with that," said Mo Elleithee, a Clinton spokesman.
Clinton aides have complained for months that the media is much harder on the former first lady than Obama. The Drudge Report story that accompanied the photo quoted an email from a Clinton campaign staffer saying, "Wouldn't we be seeing this (photo) on the cover of every magazine if it were (Clinton)?"
General Scott Gration, an Obama supporter who accompanied the senator on the trip in which the picture was snapped, said the senator agreed to put on the local garb to show respect to the community.
"Sen. Obama was given an outfit and as the guest that he was, a great guest, he took this outfit and they encouraged him to try some of it on," Gration said.
"We try on Christmas gifts, sometimes that we may not want to keep, but we try them on as being a grateful recipient. Sen. Obama did what any leader should do: accepted the gift, accepted the hospitality, accept that token of friendship and he did it in a way that showed respect and helped build the bridges that he does so well."
Susan Rice, a former Clinton aide who now serves as a foreign policy adviser to Obama, said the decision to distribute the phot was "designed to be divisive, to divide us as Americans but also to divide us from the rest of the world and suggest that the customs and cultures of other parts of the world are worthy of ridicule or condemnation.
Rice said she's traveled to Africa with both Clintons and remembers seeing the former President wear traditional clothes.
"It's a very unfortunate message to send, not one that in my experience the President or Mrs. Clinton themselves have embraced," Rice saidSource: New York Daily News.
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