Bosnia Case
Whenever Hillary Clinton has faced criticism – whether legitimate or not – she has acted like an aggrieved victim and her husband often has hammered home the point. That was the context of Bill Clinton’s lament about how the press had distorted his wife’s gaffe about coming under sniper fire in Bosnia in 1996 and running for cover.
“A lot of the way this whole campaign has been covered has amused me,” Bill Clinton said on April 10 in Boonville, Indiana, though he obviously was using the passive-aggressive tense of the word “amused.”
The former president then launched into a false explanation of his wife’s earlier false account of the Bosnia episode – to show how unfair the press was acting.
He claimed she slipped up once (when she actually had puffed up the tale several times), made the mistake late at night (when it was a daytime speech), and corrected herself immediately (when, in truth, her campaign tried to beat back the journalistic reports and only backed off a week later after video was shown on CBS News).
Hillary Clinton also never really came clean in her explanation. She, too, used the cop-out excuse of exhaustion. A more plausible reason was that she had learned another bad lesson from the Republicans, that you often can get away with making false claims if you’re willing to denounce honest journalists who dare point out the facts.
But unlike the Republicans who have built their own machine – complete with dedicated media attack groups to go after troublesome journalists – the Clintons have a much more modest operation, essentially her campaign staff plus a handful of loyal commentators and a collection of angry bloggers.
Still, those limits haven’t stopped the Clintons from trying to bend reality to their advantage. To do so, they often have played games with one of the most sensitive issues in American politics, the historic discrimination against women.
Whenever Hillary Clinton has found herself in a tight spot, she has thrown down the gender card – even sometimes while saying she would never do such a thing – with complaints about the “all boys’ club” or talk about “breaking the highest and hardest glass ceiling” or having her surrogates bash her critics for “sexism” or “misogyny.”
The Clinton campaign’s thinking apparently is that by hitting people with such ugly charges, the critics will retreat into silence, much as Ronald Reagan’s backers used the phrase “soft on communism” or George W. Bush’s supporters used “soft on terror” or neocons label criticism of Israeli government policies as “anti-semitic.”
‘Big Boy’ Bullies
One example of this strategy came in late March when Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Barack Obama supporter, suggested that it might be time for Hillary Clinton to consider stopping her increasingly negative campaign to avoid damaging Democratic chances in November.
Though Leahy was just expressing his own political opinion, Sen. Clinton reportedly saw something more sinister. According to the New York Times, she told two Democratic allies that she would not be “bullied out” of the race and compared Leahy’s comment with the “big boys” trying to bully a woman.
The accusation that Sen. Leahy – regarded as one of the most decent people in the U.S. Senate and an ardent supporter of women’s rights – would bully a woman struck some people in Washington as either a strange delusion or a cynical political ploy.
Sen. Clinton later denied using the words “big boys” and “bully,” but the reported comments fit with her blunt warnings that her rejection by the Democratic Party risked causing women voters to sit out the general election.
“You cannot, as a Democrat, win the White House without a very big women's vote,” she told the Washington Post. “It's impossible. You go back and look at what's happened in the last four or five elections, if women don't turn out for the Democratic nominee, we don't win.”
I also encountered angry reactions from Clinton supporters when I wrote an article three months ago – just after the New Hampshire primary – citing the danger of the Clinton-Obama race degenerating into an unseemly competition between whether women or blacks had the larger historic grievance.
Whenever Hillary Clinton has faced criticism – whether legitimate or not – she has acted like an aggrieved victim and her husband often has hammered home the point. That was the context of Bill Clinton’s lament about how the press had distorted his wife’s gaffe about coming under sniper fire in Bosnia in 1996 and running for cover.
“A lot of the way this whole campaign has been covered has amused me,” Bill Clinton said on April 10 in Boonville, Indiana, though he obviously was using the passive-aggressive tense of the word “amused.”
The former president then launched into a false explanation of his wife’s earlier false account of the Bosnia episode – to show how unfair the press was acting.
Hillary Clinton also never really came clean in her explanation. She, too, used the cop-out excuse of exhaustion. A more plausible reason was that she had learned another bad lesson from the Republicans, that you often can get away with making false claims if you’re willing to denounce honest journalists who dare point out the facts.
But unlike the Republicans who have built their own machine – complete with dedicated media attack groups to go after troublesome journalists – the Clintons have a much more modest operation, essentially her campaign staff plus a handful of loyal commentators and a collection of angry bloggers.
Still, those limits haven’t stopped the Clintons from trying to bend reality to their advantage. To do so, they often have played games with one of the most sensitive issues in American politics, the historic discrimination against women.
Whenever Hillary Clinton has found herself in a tight spot, she has thrown down the gender card – even sometimes while saying she would never do such a thing – with complaints about the “all boys’ club” or talk about “breaking the highest and hardest glass ceiling” or having her surrogates bash her critics for “sexism” or “misogyny.”
The Clinton campaign’s thinking apparently is that by hitting people with such ugly charges, the critics will retreat into silence, much as Ronald Reagan’s backers used the phrase “soft on communism” or George W. Bush’s supporters used “soft on terror” or neocons label criticism of Israeli government policies as “anti-semitic.”
‘Big Boy’ Bullies
One example of this strategy came in late March when Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Barack Obama supporter, suggested that it might be time for Hillary Clinton to consider stopping her increasingly negative campaign to avoid damaging Democratic chances in November.
Though Leahy was just expressing his own political opinion, Sen. Clinton reportedly saw something more sinister. According to the New York Times, she told two Democratic allies that she would not be “bullied out” of the race and compared Leahy’s comment with the “big boys” trying to bully a woman.
The accusation that Sen. Leahy – regarded as one of the most decent people in the U.S. Senate and an ardent supporter of women’s rights – would bully a woman struck some people in Washington as either a strange delusion or a cynical political ploy.
Sen. Clinton later denied using the words “big boys” and “bully,” but the reported comments fit with her blunt warnings that her rejection by the Democratic Party risked causing women voters to sit out the general election.
“You cannot, as a Democrat, win the White House without a very big women's vote,” she told the Washington Post. “It's impossible. You go back and look at what's happened in the last four or five elections, if women don't turn out for the Democratic nominee, we don't win.”
I also encountered angry reactions from Clinton supporters when I wrote an article three months ago – just after the New Hampshire primary – citing the danger of the Clinton-Obama race degenerating into an unseemly competition between whether women or blacks had the larger historic grievance.
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