Apparently, Bill Clinton just can’t leave well enough alone.
Three weeks after his Hillary’s “overly vivid” account of landing in Bosnia as First Lady first made headlines–and well after the flap, which has proven to be the most damaging of Hillary’s campaign, finally started receding from public consciousness–the former president used a pair of stops in rural Indiana yesterday to bring it all up again. Seeking to show how the media has mistreated his spouse, Bill told crowds in Jasper and Boonville that Hillary merely “misspoke” “one time late at night”–or, more precisely, “11 o’clock”–“when she was exhausted,” and “immediately apologized for it”; regardless, he continued, her trip to Bosnia “in 1995” (the “first… since Eleanor Roosevelt” went “to a combat zone” during World War II) was so perilous that “people had to sit on their bullet-proof flak jackets” as the plane landed–a threat level confirmed by “the president of Bosnia,” who recently said, according to Bill, that “‘when she came, there were snipers in the hills all around.’”
Reviving “Snipergate” probably would’ve been unwise no matter what Bill said; the fewer excuses the press has to poke and prod Hillary’s sorest spots, the better. But unfortunately for her, Bill’s side of the story happens to be wildly inaccurate. The reality? Exhausted or not, Hillary told the version of the Tuzla tale that got her into the hottest water–the one in which she said she landed “under sniper fire”–on the morning of March 17. Bill’s “one time” claim is wrong, too; Hillary repeated the story several times between December and March (and never at night). 42’s factual errors don’t stop there. The former First Lady flew to Tuzla in March 1996, not 1995. According to the pilot of the plane, Col. William “Goose” Changose, “nobody under my watch has ever directed anyone to sit on their flak jackets.” In an e-mail to journalist Eric Jansson, former acting Bosnian president Ejup Ganic said that even though he “was worried about overall safety,” “we didn’t expect snipers.” Clinton’s first “acknowledgment” of a “misstatement” wasn’t “immediate” at all, coming, as it did, a full 11 days after the March 17 speech. She never actually “apologized.” Pat Nixon, not Eleanor Roosevelt, was the last First Lady to visit a combat zone–assuming that Saigon circa July 1969 counts. And while it’s not exactly a factual error, Bill’s warning to reporters that “when they’re 60 they’ll forget something when they’re tired at 11 at night, too,” doesn’t exactly gibe with Hillary’s whole “ready at 3:00 a.m.” conceit. Whoops.
This, of course, is an inconvenient development for Hillary. With every political reporter and blogger in the country now eagerly trumpeting Bill’s gaffes, I wouldn’t expect to hear much about the candidate’s $4 billion a year crime-fighting plan (announced today in Philadelphia) on the evening news. Instead, it’ll be all about her husband’s near-comical disregard for the truth–which manages simultaneously to remind voters of the original Bosnia contretemps and provide a whole new slew of easily digestible distortions, exaggerations and inaccuracies to reinforce the impression that the Clintons can’t be trusted. What’s more, the punditocracy will inevitably amplify the coverage with meta-stories about Bill himself. As NBC’s Chuck Todd asked this morning, in a pitch-perfect preview of what’s to come, “Has Bill Clinton helped HRC’s bid more than he’s hurt it? She may not have gotten this far without him, but is he preventing her from getting to the finish line?” Already, the blogs are buzzing about how WJC, who seems unable to stick to his talking point or recognize that, with the Web, local news becomes national in a nanosecond, “may well have never been elected president in the YouTube era.” If this keeps up, Hillary might want to skip saying anything, you know, important for a few days. No one will be listening.
And that’s precisely the problem. I don’t think Bill’s “incident in Indiana” should reflect poorly on Hillary. As spokesman Phil Singer said this morning, ““Senator Clinton appreciates her husband standing up for her, but this was her mistake and she takes responsibility for it”; in other words, we have no idea what Bill is talking about. But this whole dynamic–Bill talks; the world listens; and Hillary’s campaign cringes–only serves to underscore what I’ve long considered the central problem of a potential Hillary presidency. Bill can’t seem to resist speaking out, and we–the press–and you–America–can’t seem to resist paying attention. Back in November, I noted the ex-president’s near-pathological need to comment on Hillary’s troubles, from driver’s licenses to gender to Iraq, often long after the media had moved on; each time, Bill brought us back to the sore spot. It’s clear now that Bill can’t quite control the urge–to defend, to clarify, to dissemble, to hear his own voice. In primary season, as I put it last fall, this lack of discipline hurts Hillary more than it hurts voters. But what would happen if she won the election? No one knows how a presidency saddled with two (sometimes conflicting) centers-of-attention would work. (And the Colombia controversy isn’t encouraging.) Distracting a candidate is one thing. Distracting a president, a political party and, by extension, the country?
Not particularly productive.
