Did The Obama Campaign Pressure Senator Clinton's Withdrawal From UN Rally?



(image via forbiddenplanet)

Even after the glorious convention speech of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton you knew that navigating between her camp and the Obama camp were going to have a few rough patches. This week Clinton, who is beloved among Orthodox Jews in New York, pulled out of a UN rally sponsored by a coalition of Jewish groups protesting Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's appearance in New York for the opening of the United Nation's General Assembly. The official reason was that Governor Palin had also been invited afterwards. "[Palin's] attendance was news to us, and this was never billed to us as a partisan political event," Clinton spokesman Philippe Reines said Wednesday. "Sen. Clinton will therefore not be attending."

This didn't seem like the full story. We couldn't quite piece together the missing piece, though. John Batchelor, who is a McCain partisan but a great commentator/ reporter has pieced together a different story regarding some pressure from the Obama camp on Hillary. From TheJohnBatchelorShow:

"My colleague Eric Shawn telephoned this morning from Fox News to ask my voice in the ongoing and byzantine story of the rally against the hallucinatory bully Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Tehran next Monday 22 at the UN that was now damaged by Mrs. Clinton's overnight withdrawal because, it was said by a Clinton speaker, the sudden inclusion of Sarah Palin at the rally made it 'partisan.' I made phone calls, got into Manhattan, and told the story in pieces to Eric on air. This was not partisan, I said, the Clintons know it is not partisan, I said. Midday what was clear was murky but it generally described brittle, threatened Obama-Biden campaign behavior. Mrs. Clinton had accepted her traditional role as keynoter at the rally last month - well before Sarah Palin was named or a player ... The Obamas wasted their words speaking ill to HRC's staff, and HRC, seeing herself trapped between the petulant Obamas and the yearning passionate Orthodox of New York (who adore HRC) chose the hard way and backed out."