Barack Obama has finally repudiated the nativist “D-Punjab” smear of Hillary Clinton that has infuriated the Indian American community (via a comment on my last post):
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama referred to as “stupid” and “caustic” his campaign’s memo last week that implied rival Hillary Clinton’s investments in India made the her fit to represent the south Asian country.
“It was a screw-up on the part of our research team,” Obama, a U.S. senator from Illinois, said during a meeting today with Des Moines Register editors and reporters. “It wasn’t anything I had seen or my senior staff had seen.”
The comments were the first in public by Obama about a research document circulated last week by his campaign referring to Clinton as “D-Punjab,” a play on journalistic shorthand meant to suggest the senator from New York as a Democrat representing a state in India.
The memo, obtained by the Clinton campaign, referred to Clinton’s investments in Indian companies and efforts to raise money from members of the Indian-American community.
It cited comments Clinton made to an Indian-American audience in March in which she said, “I can certainly run for the Senate seat in Punjab and win easily.”
“That particular quote was a joke, I think, that Hillary Clinton made to an Indian-American audience,” Obama told the Register. “The research team thought it would be clever to put that at the top.”
Obama continued, “I thought it was stupid and caustic and not only didn’t reflect my view of the complicated issue of outsourcing … it also didn’t reflect the fact that I have longstanding support and friendships within the Indian-American community.”
Obama said, “I take responsibility for it, as does our campaign. and we quickly apologized and are communicating that in various circles around the country.”
Update 6/18 8:35 PM: Via Greg Sargent, the South Asians for Obama ’08 blog has posted an appropriately contrite apology from Obama to the Indian-American community:
I wanted to respond personally to the concerns you expressed regarding the recent research memo that our campaign put into circulation.
I believe that your concerns with the memo are justified. To begin with, the memo did not reflect my own views on the importance of America’s relationship with India. I have long believed that the best way to promote U.S. economic growth and opportunity for American workers is to continually improve the skills of our own workforce and invest in our own scientific research, technological capacity and infrastructure, rather than to try to insulate ourselves from the global economy.
More importantly, the memo’s caustic tone, and its focus on contributions by Indian-Americans to the Clinton campaign, was potentially hurtful, and as such, unacceptable. The memo also ignored my own long-standing relationship to – and support from – the Indian-American community.
In sum, our campaign made a mistake. Although I was not aware of the contents of the memo prior to its distribution, I consider the entire campaign – and in particular myself – responsible for the mistake. We have taken appropriate action to prevent errors like this from happening in the future.
Please feel free to share this letter with other members of your organization or leaders in the Indian-American community. I look forward to our continued friendship and exchange of ideas – during the course of this campaign, and beyond.
Sincerely,
Barack Obama