"Lack of American Roots"

The Atlantic has online a sampling of memos from the Clinton campaign. From Mark Penn to Hillary Clinton, "WEEKLY STRATEGIC REVIEW ON HILLARY CLINTON FOR PRESIDENT CAMPAIGN," March 19, 2007, a passage concerning Barack Obama:

Lack of American Roots

All of these articles about his boyhood in Indonesia and his life in Hawaii are geared towards showing his background is diverse, multicultural and putting that in a new light.

Save it for 2050.

It also exposes a very strong weakness for him — his roots to basic American values and culture are at best limited. I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values. He told the people of NH yesterday he has a Kansas accent because his mother was from there. His mother lived in many states as far as we can tell — but this is an example of the nonsense he uses to cover this up.

Elsewhere in this memo (page four), Penn says that the right knows (as Penn of course knew) that Obama is "unelectable except perhaps against Atila [sic] the Hun." Read more:

The Hillary Clinton Memos (The Atlantic)
Mark Penn: The man who blew the presidency (The Independent)