Obama Campaign Decries Clinton S.C. Ad

By Matthew Mosk
Barack Obama's presidential campaign team is crying foul today over a new radio ad that rival Hillary Clinton has begun to air in South Carolina.

According to a transcript and audio of the ad being circulated by the Obama camp, the radio spot presents a clip of Obama saying, "The Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time there over the last 10, 15 years."

A voiceover then says, "Really? Aren't those the ideas that got us into the economic mess we're in today? Ideas like special tax breaks for Wall Street. Running up a $9 trillion debt. Refusing to raise the minimum wage or deal with the housing crisis. Are those the ideas Barack Obama's talking about?"

The line of attack is one that Clinton used during the contentious Democratic debate in South Carolina, and one she and her husband have both repeated on the stump -- though the radio ad drops the Clintons' earlier assertion that Obama said that the Republicans had "all the good ideas" during the 90s.

The Washington Post Fact Checker columnist, Michael Dobbs, examined the Clintons' earlier critique of the Obama remark, and concluded that the Clinton attacks distorted Obama's comment. Dobbs noted that Obama never said the Republican ideas were good ones, and during the interview in which he made the comment, he went on to criticize the Republican obsession with tax cuts.

Here, courtesy of FactCheck.Org, is the full text of what Obama told the editorial board of the Reno Gazette-Journal:

Obama (Jan. 14, 2008): The Republican approach has played itself out. I think it's fair to say that the Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time there over the last 10, 15 years, in the sense that they were challenging conventional wisdom. Now, you've heard it all before. You look at the economic policies when they're being debated among the presidential candidates, it's all tax cuts. Well, we know, we've done that; we've tried it. That's not really going to solve our energy problems, for example.