Wow. Hillary and Obama’s campaigns are quick to use the racial defense in the Norman Hsu scandal, and it appears the door was opened when Bill Sammon of the Washington Examiner – usually a really reliable reporter – inserted a racial component into a Fred Thompson advisor’s words on the Norman Hsu scandal.
Here’s what Thompson adviser Rich Galen said about the scandal, according to Sammon:
“You have to look at this with a great deal of skepticism that – having been through this sort of thing in ‘96 – that nobody thought to say, ‘Hey, you know, we better take another look at this before we take all this money,’ ” he said.
“And the fact that nobody did – or if they did, they decided to just put their finger in front of their lips and say shhh and try to sneak off into the distance – tells you a great deal about the fact that the Hillary Clinton campaign is the Bill Clinton campaign redux.”
Here’s the opening paragraphs of Sammon’s story:
Hillary Clinton’s links to illegal fundraising by Asian-Americans in 1996 should have made her wary of accepting $850,000 from a fugitive Asian-American this year, a rival presidential campaign said Tuesday.
The criticism came from an adviser to former Republican Sen. Fred Thompson, who chaired a Senate investigation into illegal contributions by Asian-Americans to Bill Clinton’s re-election campaign and the couple’s legal defense fund in the 1996 election cycle.
Thompson adviser Rich Galen said Clinton’s 2008 campaign has become “the sequel” to her husband’s scandal-plagued 1996 campaign.
Unless there’s some other comment that Sammon didn’t quote (and if not, why not?), Galen didn’t say anything about Asian-Americans. His comment “this sort of thing in 1996″ doesn’t refer to the ethnic backgrounds of the donors. Looking back, we can find 27 individuals charged and 22 convicted by the Department of s Campaign Financing Task Force, which was established to investigate allegations of campaign financing abuses during the 1996 election cycle. We find individuals with names like Ortiz, Jiminez, Haney and Glicken. Give credit to the Clintons: they managed to create a financing scandal that “looked like America.”
But because of Sammon’s wording, look at the defenses we’re seeing from the Clinton and Obama camps:
[Hillary Clinton spokesman Howard] Wolfson said, “We reject the suggestion that suspicion should be based on ethnicity in America.
“Mr. Hsu donated to numerous charities and more than two dozen candidates and committees,” he told The Examiner. “Despite conducting a thorough review of public records, our campaign, like these others, was unaware of Mr. Hsu’s decade-plus-old warrant.”
In 2005, prior to raising funds for Clinton, Hsu co-hosted a fundraiser for Barack Obama, who later became a Democratic presidential candidate. Obama’s campaign is now investigating the validity of $19,000 in contributions it accepted from people associated with Hsu.
“Are you suggesting we should have racially profiled Hsu because he’s Asian?” Obama spokesman Bill Burton asked.
Of course. It’s a racial issue now. Those asking the questions about Hsu are the bad guys. Right.