2008 United States presidential election controversies and attacks

During the 2008 U.S. presidential election, a number of issues were raised by various people and organizations that tended to portray various candidates in a negative light, including the candidates themselves, their campaign staff and advisors, news organizations, and political organizations.

Relating to Hillary Rodham Clinton

Cattle Futures

In 1978 and 1979, lawyer and First Lady of Arkansas Hillary Rodham engaged in a series of trades of cattle futures contracts. This became controversial in 1994, after Hillary Rodham Clinton had become First Lady of the United States, because of the high rate of return and possible conflict of interest.

Rose Law Firm

Whitewater

White House Travel Office

Bosnian sniper fire
In March, 2008, Clinton admitted that campaign statements about having come under hostile fire from snipers during a 1996 visit to U.S. troops at Tuzla Air Base in Bosnia-Herzegovina were mistaken The accuracy of her description of the event had initially been questioned by the comedian David Adkins (known popularly as "Sinbad"), who along with singer Sheryl Crow accompanied her on the trip. The incident attracted considerable media attention, which was claimed to undermine her credibility and her claims of foreign policy expertise.

Relating to Rudy Giuliani

9/11 issues

As Mayor of New York City at the time of the 9/11 attacks, Giuliani initially earned widespread praise, including being named Time Magazine's Person of the Year in 2001. However, during the 2008 Republican primary opponents, and some victim groups and rescue personnel who were dissatisfied with his handling of the response efforts, announced that they would Swift Boat his campaign. The International Association of Fire Fighters drafted, then shelved, an election-related statement harshly criticizing his leadership.

Relating to John McCain

Keating Five

John McCain (R-AZ) was one of five United States Senators accused of corruption in 1989, igniting a major political scandal as part of the larger Savings and Loan crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s. They were accused of improperly aiding Charles H. Keating, Jr., chairman of the failed Lincoln Savings and Loan Association, which was the target of an investigation by the Federal Home Loan Bank Board.

John Hagee

McCain has been criticized for seeking and accepting the endorsement of John Hagee, a non-denominational evangelical leader. McCain has said it was probably a mistake, but that he was still happy to get it.

Rod Parsley

Rod Parsley, a televangelist, is senior pastor of World Harvest Church, a Pentecostal megachurch in Columbus, Ohio, and founder and president of The Center for Moral Clarity. He has called Islam a "false religion" and has advocated war against it. McCain has referred to him as his "spiritual advisor", accepted his endorsement, and not denounced or rejected Parsley's statements.

Lobbyist Connection

On February 21, 2008, in the midst of John McCain's campaign in the 2008 Republican presidential primaries, both The New York Times and the Washington Post published articles detailing rumors of an improper relationship between John McCain and lobbyist Vicki Iseman.

Cindy McCain family recipes
In April, 2008, "family recipes" for ahi tuna with Napa cabbage salad, crab scampi with whole wheat pasta, pasta with turkey sausage, and passion fruit mousse attributed on McCain's campaign website to his wife, Cindy Hensley McCain, were found to have been plagiarized from the Food Network.
The discovery was made by an environmental lawyer and amateur home chef, who repeatedly found links to the McCain site when using google to search for ingredients in Giada De Laurentiis recipies. The story was first reported in the Huffington Post, and quickly spread. The campaign attributed the problem to an error by an intern.

Relating to Barack Obama

Muslim and madrassa claims

Middle name
Some opponents of Obama, particularly a few conservatives, featured his middle name "Hussein" and the similarity of his last name with "Osama" to highlight his Muslim heritage, draw inferences and associations with terrorists, and question his loyalty to the United States. In February, 2008, the Tennessee Republican Party circulated a memo titled "Anti-Semites for Obama" that featured his middle name and showed a picture of him in African clothes while on a trip to Africa. A website, ExposeObama.com, sent out emails in early 2008 that included messages such as "President Barack Hussein Obama ... the scariest four words in the English language!" These incidents were not openly supported, and were generally condemned, by the other candidate' official campaigns and by the major parties.

Bill Ayers

In February, 2008, reports began circulating about Obama's connection with Bill Ayers, a former member of the radical 1960's group the Weather Underground. The two had served together for three years on the board of the Woods Fund of Chicago, an anti-poverty foundation founded in 1941, and had appeared on various panels. Ayers, who lived in the same Chicago neighborhood Obama did, had donated $200 to Obama's 2001 state senate campaign. A Bloomberg L.P. reporter quoted Hillary Clinton who stated that the Republican Party might use Obama's association with Ayers to discredit Obama if he were chosen as the nominee of the Democratic Party. At the Democratic Party primary debate in Philadelphia on April 16, 2008, (full transcript), moderator George Stephanopoulos questioned Obama on the matter, leading to an exchange between Obama and Clinton. Mayor Richard M. Daley of Chicago issued a statement in support of Bill Ayers on April 17, as did the Chicago Tribune editorial board. During the Philadelphia debate, in response to Sen. Clinton's raising the Ayers issue, Obama referred to President Bill Clinton's pardoning of two Weather Underground convicts. (The convicts were Linda Sue Evans and Susan Rosenberg, although Obama did not refer to them by name.)

Rev. Jeremiah Wright

In March 2008, a controversy broke out concerning Obama's 23-year relationship with his (now retired) pastor and religious mentor, Jeremiah Wright, who preached Black Liberation Theology at Trinity United Church in Chicago, Illinois.

'Small town' comments
Senator Obama campaigned in Pennsylvania in preparation for the April 22 Pennsylvania primary, and spoke about small-town Pennsylvania at a private April 6 fundraising event in San Francisco. His remarks were widely reported:

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Obama subsequently said that he did not choose his words well, but added: "I said something that everybody knows is true." Obama had addressed similar themes of guns, religion, and economics in 2004 during an interview with Charlie Rose. Obama's strategist David Axelrod mentioned that Bill Clinton had made similar comments during his presidential campaign in 1991.

Tony Rezko

Obama has been accused of favoritism and improper business dealings with Chicago developer Tony Rezko and associates. Obama held a job from 1993 to 2002 with small Chicago law firm Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, which represented Rezko and his development company, Rezmar. The firm's then senior partner, Allison S. Davis, later went into business with Rezko. When Obama began his political career Rezko supported him, serving on his U.S. Senate finance committee and eventually along with his companies and associates donating $250,000 to his U.S. Senate campaign. Obama later purchased a home, in the process engaging in a series of transactions that involved Rezko's wife, ultimately resulting in a substantial profit for Rezko's development company. Obama acknowledged that the exchange created an appearance of impropriety In 2007, Obama wrote letters on behalf of a low-income building project headed by Rezko and Davis. Obama and Rezko, through their spokespeople, denied that the letters were written as a favor. Obama's spokesman claimed the support was offered solely in the interest of the community.

The land trade was reported by the major Chicago newspapers in late 2006, and the low income development transaction was reported locally in June, 2007. The Clinton campaign picked up the issue as a way of impugning Obama's ethics, an effort the Obama campaign attempted to counter by calling attention to Clinton's own Whitewater scandal. When Rezko was charged with federal crimes in connection with the "Operation Board Games" case (which did not involve Obama), the judge assigned to the case a former member of the Independent Counsel team that prosecuted the Whitewater case. Barack Obama's threat to withdraw from NAFTA should be viewed as "political positioning," according to a memo written after the U.S. presidential hopeful's senior economic policy adviser met with Canadian officials. According to a memo written by Canadian consulate staffer Joseph DeMora, after a meeting in Chicago last week with Austan Goolsbee and Canadian Consul General Georges Rioux, assuring from Goosbee suggested Obama's wasn't serious about his comments threatening to pull the United States out of the 15-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico unless it's renegotiated.

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