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2008-03-31 Home Front: Politix
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Hillary's St. Patrick's Day Massacre
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By FRANK RICH
 MOST politicians lie. Most people over 50, as I know all too well, misremember things. So here is the one compelling mystery still unresolved about Hillary Clintons Bosnia fairy tale: Why did she keep repeating this whopper for nearly three months, well after it had been publicly debunked by journalists and eyewitnesses?
| I love it when they eat their own. |
In January, after Senator Clinton first inserted the threat of sniper fire into her stump speech, Elizabeth Sullivan of The Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote that the story couldnt be true because by the time of the first ladys visit in March 1996, the war was over. Meredith Vieira asked Mrs. Clinton on the Today show why, if she was on the front lines, she took along a U.S.O. performer like Sinbad. Earlier this month, a week before Mrs. Clinton fatefully rearmed those snipers one time too many, Sinbad himself spoke up to The Washington Post: I think the only red phone moment was: Do we eat here or at the next place?
Yet Mrs. Clinton was undeterred. She dismissed Sinbad as a comedian and recycled her fiction once more on St. Patricks Day. When Michael Dobbs fact-checked it for The Post last weekend and proclaimed it worthy of four Pinocchios, her campaign pushed back. The Clinton camp enforcer Howard Wolfson phoned in to Morning Joe on MSNBC Monday and truculently quoted a sheaf of news stories that he said supported her account. Only later that day, a full week after her speech, did he start to retreat, suggesting it was possible she misspoke in the most recent instance of her retelling of her excellent Bosnia adventure.
| Clinton campaign in a nutshell. |
Since Mrs. Clinton had told a similar story in previous instances, this was misleading at best. It was also dishonest to characterize what she had done as misspeaking or as a result of sleep deprivation, as the candidate herself would soon assert. The Bosnia anecdote was part of her prepared remarks, scripted and vetted with her staff. Not that it mattered anymore. The self-inflicted damage had been done. The debate about Barack Obamas relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright was almost smothered in the rubble of Mrs. Clintons Bosnian bridge too far.
Which brings us back to our question: Why would so smart a candidate play political Russian roulette with virtually all the bullet chambers loaded?
Sometimes only a shrink can decipher why some politicians persist in flagrantly taking giant risks, all but daring others to catch them in the act (see: Spitzer, Eliot). Carl Bernstein, a sometimes admiring Hillary Clinton biographer, has called the Bosnia debacle a watershed event for her campaign because it revives her long history of balancing good works with misstatements and elisions, from the health-care task force fiasco onward.
But this event may be a watershed for two other reasons that have implications beyond Mrs. Clintons character and candidacy, spilling over into the 2008 campaign as a whole. It reveals both the continued salience of that supposedly receding issue, the Iraq war, and the accelerating power of viral politics, as exemplified by YouTube, to override the retail politics still venerated by the Beltway establishment.
Whats been lost in the furor over Mrs. Clintons Bosnia fairy tale is that her disastrous last recycling of it, the one that blew up in her face, kicked off her major address on the war, timed to its fifth anniversary. Still unable to escape the stain of the single most damaging stand in her public career, she felt compelled to cloak herself, however fictionally, in an American humanitarian intervention that is not synonymous with quagmire.
Perhaps she thought that by taking the huge gamble of misspeaking one more time about her narrow escape on the tarmac at Tuzla, she could compensate for misvoting on Iraq. Instead, her fictionalized derring-do may have stirred national trace memories of two of the signature propaganda stunts of the war: the Rambo myth the Pentagon concocted for Pvt. Jessica Lynch and President Bushs flyboy antics on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln during Mission Accomplished.
That Mrs. Clintons campaign kept insisting her Bosnia tale was the truth two days after The Post exposed it as utter fiction also shows the political perils of 20th-century analog arrogance in a digital age. Incredible as it seems, the professionals around Mrs. Clinton though surely knowing her story was false thought she could tough it out. They ignored the likelihood that a television network would broadcast the inevitable press pool video of a first ladys foreign trip as the CBS Evening News did on Monday night and that this smoking gun would then become an unstoppable assault weapon once harnessed to the Web.
| I'm just guessing but I think they were counting on CBS to keep their mouths shut ... |
The Drudge Reports link to the YouTube iteration of the CBS News piece transformed it into a cultural phenomenon reaching far beyond a third-place network news programs nightly audience. It had more YouTube views than the inflammatory Wright sermons, more than even the promotional video of Britney Spears making her latest comeback on a TV sitcom. It was as this digital avalanche crashed down that Mrs. Clinton, backed into a corner, started offering the alibi of sleep deprivation and then tried to reignite the racial fires around Mr. Wright.
The Clinton campaigns cluelessness about the Web has been apparent from the start, and not just in its lagging fund-raising. Witness the canned Hillary Web chats and Hillcasts, the soupy Web contest to choose a campaign song (the winner, an Air Canada advertising jingle sung by Celine Dion, was quickly dumped), and the little-watched electronic national town-hall meeting on the eve of Super Tuesday. Web surfers have rejected these stunts as the old-school infomercials they so blatantly are.
| Notice the Hildebeast never once offered to meet with some big-time political bloggers, left right or center, for a conversation. That would have generated some big hits and press for her, but she isn't willing to do anything unscripted ... |
Senator Obama, for all his campaigns Internet prowess, made his own media mistake by not getting ahead of the inevitable emergence of commercially available Wright videos on both cable TV and the Web. But he got lucky. YouTube videos of a candidate in full tilt or full humiliation, were learning, can outdraw videos of a candidates fire-breathing pastor. Both the CBS News piece on Mrs. Clinton in Bosnia and the full video of Mr. Obamas speech on race have drawn more views than the most popular clips of a raging Mr. Wright.
But the political power of the Bosnia incident speaks at least as much to the passions aroused by the war as to the media dynamics of the Web. For all the economic anxiety roiling Americans, they have not forgotten Iraq. The anger can rise again in a flash when stoked by events on the ground or politicians at home, as it has throughout the rites surrounding the fifth anniversary of the invasion and 4,000th American combat death. This will keep happening as it becomes more apparent that the surge is a stalemate according to the NYT, bringing neither lower troop levels nor anything more than a fragile temporary stability to Iraq. John McCains apparent obliviousness to this fact remains a boon to the Democrats.
| Except that about 60% of the public agrees with John and is willing to hang in there as long as events don't go to hell in Iraq. 60% will win the election. |
The war is certainly a bigger issue in 2008 than race. Yet it remains a persistent Beltway refrain that race will hinder Mr. Obama at every turn, no matter how often reality contradicts the thesis. Whites wouldnt vote for a black man in states like Iowa and New Hampshire; whites wouldnt vote for blacks in South Carolina; blacks wouldnt vote for a black man who wasnt black enough. The newest incessantly repeated scenario has it that Mr. Obamas fate now all depends on a stereotypical white blue-collar male voter in the apotheosized rust belt town of Deer Hunter, Pa.
Continued from Page 4
Since Mrs. Clinton had told a similar story in previous instances, this was misleading at best. It was also dishonest to characterize what she had done as misspeaking or as a result of sleep deprivation, as the candidate herself would soon assert. The Bosnia anecdote was part of her prepared remarks, scripted and vetted with her staff. Not that it mattered anymore. The self-inflicted damage had been done. The debate about Barack Obamas relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright was almost smothered in the rubble of Mrs. Clintons Bosnian bridge too far.
Which brings us back to our question: Why would so smart a candidate play political Russian roulette with virtually all the bullet chambers loaded?
Sometimes only a shrink can decipher why some politicians persist in flagrantly taking giant risks, all but daring others to catch them in the act (see: Spitzer, Eliot). Carl Bernstein, a sometimes admiring Hillary Clinton biographer, has called the Bosnia debacle a watershed event for her campaign because it revives her long history of balancing good works with misstatements and elisions, from the health-care task force fiasco onward.
But this event may be a watershed for two other reasons that have implications beyond Mrs. Clintons character and candidacy, spilling over into the 2008 campaign as a whole. It reveals both the continued salience of that supposedly receding issue, the Iraq war, and the accelerating power of viral politics, as exemplified by YouTube, to override the retail politics still venerated by the Beltway establishment.
Whats been lost in the furor over Mrs. Clintons Bosnia fairy tale is that her disastrous last recycling of it, the one that blew up in her face, kicked off her major address on the war, timed to its fifth anniversary. Still unable to escape the stain of the single most damaging stand in her public career, she felt compelled to cloak herself, however fictionally, in an American humanitarian intervention that is not synonymous with quagmire.
Perhaps she thought that by taking the huge gamble of misspeaking one more time about her narrow escape on the tarmac at Tuzla, she could compensate for misvoting on Iraq. Instead, her fictionalized derring-do may have stirred national trace memories of two of the signature propaganda stunts of the war: the Rambo myth the Pentagon concocted for Pvt. Jessica Lynch and President Bushs flyboy antics on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln during Mission Accomplished.
That Mrs. Clintons campaign kept insisting her Bosnia tale was the truth two days after The Post exposed it as utter fiction also shows the political perils of 20th-century analog arrogance in a digital age. Incredible as it seems, the professionals around Mrs. Clinton though surely knowing her story was false thought she could tough it out. They ignored the likelihood that a television network would broadcast the inevitable press pool video of a first ladys foreign trip as the CBS Evening News did on Monday night and that this smoking gun would then become an unstoppable assault weapon once harnessed to the Web.
The Drudge Reports link to the YouTube iteration of the CBS News piece transformed it into a cultural phenomenon reaching far beyond a third-place network news programs nightly audience. It had more YouTube views than the inflammatory Wright sermons, more than even the promotional video of Britney Spears making her latest comeback on a TV sitcom. It was as this digital avalanche crashed down that Mrs. Clinton, backed into a corner, started offering the alibi of sleep deprivation and then tried to reignite the racial fires around Mr. Wright.
The Clinton campaigns cluelessness about the Web has been apparent from the start, and not just in its lagging fund-raising. Witness the canned Hillary Web chats and Hillcasts, the soupy Web contest to choose a campaign song (the winner, an Air Canada advertising jingle sung by Celine Dion, was quickly dumped), and the little-watched electronic national town-hall meeting on the eve of Super Tuesday. Web surfers have rejected these stunts as the old-school infomercials they so blatantly are.
Senator Obama, for all his campaigns Internet prowess, made his own media mistake by not getting ahead of the inevitable emergence of commercially available Wright videos on both cable TV and the Web. But he got lucky. YouTube videos of a candidate in full tilt or full humiliation, were learning, can outdraw videos of a candidates fire-breathing pastor. Both the CBS News piece on Mrs. Clinton in Bosnia and the full video of Mr. Obamas speech on race have drawn more views than the most popular clips of a raging Mr. Wright.
But the political power of the Bosnia incident speaks at least as much to the passions aroused by the war as to the media dynamics of the Web. For all the economic anxiety roiling Americans, they have not forgotten Iraq. The anger can rise again in a flash when stoked by events on the ground or politicians at home, as it has throughout the rites surrounding the fifth anniversary of the invasion and 4,000th American combat death. This will keep happening as it becomes more apparent that the surge is a stalemate, bringing neither lower troop levels nor anything more than a fragile temporary stability to Iraq. John McCains apparent obliviousness to this fact remains a boon to the Democrats.
The war is certainly a bigger issue in 2008 than race. Yet it remains a persistent Beltway refrain that race will hinder Mr. Obama at every turn, no matter how often reality contradicts the thesis. Whites wouldnt vote for a black man in states like Iowa and New Hampshire; whites wouldnt vote for blacks in South Carolina; blacks wouldnt vote for a black man who wasnt black enough. The newest incessantly repeated scenario has it that Mr. Obamas fate now all depends on a stereotypical white blue-collar male voter in the apotheosized rust belt town of Deer Hunter, Pa.
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