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Hillary's St. Patrick's Day Massacre | |||||
2008-03-31 | |||||
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 ClintonÂ’s 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?
Yet Mrs. Clinton was undeterred. She dismissed Sinbad as a “comedian” and recycled her fiction once more on St. Patrick’s 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.
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. Clinton’s 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. What’s been lost in the furor over Mrs. Clinton’s 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 Bush’s flyboy antics on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln during “Mission Accomplished.” That Mrs. Clinton’s 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 lady’s 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 Clinton campaign’s 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.
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
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Posted by:Fred |
#9 The Democrats have been nurturing and fertilizing the politics of division. They have fostered cultural wars. They have tried to Balkanize America. They have tried to split this great country into factions. Now the chickens are coming home to roost and they don't seem to have a clue that they have fouled their own nest. |
Posted by: JohnQC 2008-03-31 23:18 |
#8 Her problem is that even her fellow Democrats have started to take notice that she doesnÂ’t have the ability to spread the bullshit like her husband. More like that she doesn't have the power to break kneecaps and careers like her husband did... |
Posted by: Pappy 2008-03-31 21:30 |
#7 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 poor dems. Frank Rich and friends are so deranged that think they can write off Hillary's lie by using 6 billion words to say that it is understandable she would be compelled to lie because of her "misvoting on Iraq". Yeah, right Frank. Who were you saying was gettin old and out of it? |
Posted by: Woodrow Slusorong7967 2008-03-31 21:16 |
#6 They ignored the likelihood that a television network would broadcast the inevitable press pool video of a first ladyÂ’s foreign trip... I doubt it. They are a) pros, and b) Team Clinton. They calculated the likelihood as near-zero based on their prior experience with factor (b) being Teflon-like with the media between 1993 and 2000. |
Posted by: Grenter Protector of the Geats4975 2008-03-31 16:02 |
#5 Frank Rich's column is verbose but its an indicator that the NYTimes has turned on Hillary. Not only is she about done for 2008, but with the media elite hitting her like this it will make fundraising way more difficult both for this year and if she wants to try for a Prez bid in 2012. Of course, by 2016, Chelsea will be eligible to be elected President. |
Posted by: mhw 2008-03-31 12:29 |
#4 Senator ClintonsÂ’ problem is not that she has a difficulty telling the truth. Face it, the Clinton legacy will always be about complete disregard for raw facts that donÂ’t support their narrative. Her problem is that even her fellow Democrats have started to take notice that she doesnÂ’t have the ability to spread the bullshit like her husband. |
Posted by: DepotGuy 2008-03-31 11:54 |
#3 Politicians and Car Dealers are the only people left on the planet that are unaware of the coming of the digital age. Curious coincidence wouldn't you say? You can sit there in front of the car dealer with the Edmunds papers in your hands in plain view of them and listen to them lie with a straight face. Same with politicians. |
Posted by: bigjim-ky 2008-03-31 06:38 |
#2 Oh, and the page 4 onward is a dupe. |
Posted by: anonymous5089 2008-03-31 05:21 |
#1 Quagmire! |
Posted by: anonymous5089 2008-03-31 05:20 |