Hillary swiftboated herself
Hillary Clinton’s campaign for President is over, and anyone with a lick of sense knows it. The amazing thing is that she has done it to herself by stealth implosion.
Imagine the Republican attack ads this fall, if by some fluke Clinton gets the Democratic nomination. The 30 second spot that would run again and again in prime time would have the simplicity of LBJ’s “Daisy” ad against Barry Goldwater in the 1964 campaign. The ad could even be in black and white, for nostalgia’s sake.
“I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.“
Hillary Clinton, speech at George Washington University, March 17, 2008.
The ad would picture Hillary Clinton being greeted in Bosnia by a little girl with flowers. The voice-over would be Hillary ’s own words describing how she had to run for cover to avoid sniper fire.
The ad would end with the simple question:
“Liar or lunatic?”
R. J. Eskow wrote on Friday:
“If you’re Hillary Clinton and you’ve just been caught in a “whopper,” the only thing to be grateful for is that it’s Good Friday and people are distracted. How bad could this story be for her? When you tell the American public you faced gunfire, and it turns out all you really faced was a little girl with flowers — well, that’s as bad as it gets. When you dramatically say you made a journey that was too dangerous for the president, only to have it revealed that he made the same trip two months earlier — and that your teenaged daughter was by your side — that only makes it worse.
“And there’s video.
“If they wanted to, the networks could juxtapose video of Sen. Clinton’s dramatic recitation of the battle with this clip of that sweet eight-year-old on the tarmac with a bouquet. The question is: Will they want to?”
R. J. Eskow - How Will Hillary’s Bosnia “Whopper” Play in the Media?
If the networks don’t push this story now, the Republican 527’s will do it later, if Hillary is the nominee.
Hillary is toast. I do not expect her to realize or admit it.
Will the Democratic Party as a whole be able to face up to the facts?
March 26, 2008 - CNN: Bernstein: Hillary Clinton: Truth or Consequences
“The jury — armed with definitive evidence like the CBS tape of Hillary Clinton’s Bosnian adventure — seems on the verge of returning a negative verdict on her candidacy. “
“The Clintons have a well-formed habit of misspeaking. Bill Clinton, of course, was always doing it. But his wife has also over the years mastered the art of misspeaking in what Mark Twain once described as an ‘experienced, industrious, ambitious and often quite picturesque’ way . . .
“She has misspoken on any number of occasions when the straight truth might have been very damaging: over her involvement in the various scandals of the early Clinton years. But alongside these instrumental whoppers, there have been some befuddlingly pointless little tiddlers too.
” . . . In fact the facility with which the Clintons misspeak is so pronounced that it is quite possible they have genuinely forgotten how to tell the plain truth. There was no real need for Mrs Clinton to make the claim about landing in sniper fire. But the compulsion to embroider, to dissemble and to dissimulate is now so entrenched in the synapses of the Clinton brain that it came to her as naturally as the truth would to a slow-witted innocent.”
“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.”
Apr 7, 2008 Issue, Newsweek: Jonathan Alter - The Tales Hillary Tells
“Hillary’s Bosnia whopper traces back to 1992, when she angrily told reporters who questioned her role in her husband’s career that she hadn’t been staying home “baking cookies and having teas” but was instead out working. This was in apparent reference to her 15 years as a corporate lawyer for the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock. On the trail she now emphasizes her “35 years of public service,” which, because it presumably doesn’t include corporate legal work, is a reference to her extensive nonprofit activity and to her time as First Lady of Arkansas and of the United States. While Hillary is not generally an insecure person, she is highly defensive about this record. Without it, she would have only seven years (her Senate career) of public service to cite. Hillary’s “movie” of her own life, and of her presidential campaign, is dependent on those years seeming as meaningful as possible. An assault on their importance cuts deep.
“Late last year, Obama began to push that button by belittling her travel to 80 countries as First Lady. He said that “having tea” with foreign leaders wasn’t the big-time foreign-policy experience she claimed as a major reason to elect her. So Hillary began to tell the Tuzla story, which had first appeared in her memoirs, in a more dramatic fashion. “I don’t remember anyone offering me tea on the tarmac there,” she said, firing back at Obama . . . . “
[...] Hillary Clinton admits to being a fast talker Published March 25, 2008 2008 Presidential Primary , Hillary Clinton , Politics Tags: 2008 Presidential Primary, Hillary Clinton, Hillary in Bosnia, Hillary misspoke, Politics Sen. Hillary Clinton said she “misspoke” about sniper fire in Bosnia, according to CNN. See: Hillary swiftboated herself. [...]
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