One can see the logic of what Steven Benen says here, that one of the benefits of having a prolonged Democratic primary race, after Republicans have already settled on John McCain, even if reluctantly, is that this sets up what he calls a two-against-one dynamic – the Republicans can’t direct all of their attacks on just one Democrat, and there are two Democrats to go after McCain at the same time. What could be better? The problem is that this works when Democrats realize this isn’t the right time at all to praise McCain. You throw away your advantage, but that is what is happening.
To review – at a press conference on Monday March 3, in Ohio, Hillary Clinton was defending her now famous “3:00 am” ad – the one saying you should be afraid if Obama ends up in the White House, because he cannot handle a world crisis. She can - she has that very experience. And she told reporters this – “I have a lifetime of experience I will bring to the White House. I know Senator McCain has a lifetime of experience he will bring to the White House. And Senator Obama has a speech he made in 2002.”
Many Democrats were appalled – was she was saying it was her or McCain, that if Obama got the nomination the only safe thing to do for America would be for everyone to vote for McCain? That seemed odd – for her to imply that any rational person would vote for the Republican if she were not the Democratic nominee. Of course it was a veiled and calculated warning – the Democrats will lose in November if they nominate an inexperienced wimp who doesn’t understand the real world, as he’s young and naïve and he has no real experience at much of anything.
But instead of backing off after so many were appalled, two days later she repeated this. As James Fallows reported on Wednesday – “In a live CNN interview just now, Sen. Clinton repeated, twice, the ‘Sen. McCain has a lifetime of experience, I have a lifetime of experience, Sen. Obama has one speech in 2002′ line. By what logic, exactly, does a member of the Democratic party include the ‘Sen. McCain has a lifetime of experience’ part of that sentence?”
But she wasn’t deterred. The next day she went further:
“I think that since we now know Sen. McCain will be the nominee for the Republican Party, national security will be front and center in this election. We all know that. And I think it’s imperative that each of us be able to demonstrate we can cross the commander-in-chief threshold,” the New York senator told reporters crowded into an infant’s bedroom-sized hotel conference room in Washington.
“I believe that I’ve done that. Certainly, Sen. McCain has done that and you’ll have to ask Sen. Obama with respect to his candidacy,” she said.
Calling McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee a good friend and a “distinguished man with a great history of service to our country,” Clinton said, “Both of us will be on that stage having crossed that threshold.”
So she made up a new rule – there’s now this threshold. Well, those who make the rules win the game. The new rule was quickly adopted by most of the press, or so it seemed to many of us watching the news – there was this obvious rule that determined who should be taken seriously, and who not, and wise heads nodded and wondered how Obama was ever going to prove he met the accepted criteria for just who was commander-in-chief material. No one called it Hillary’s Rule - it was as if it had always been there. And only she and McCain have the prerequisites for the job.
Benen wryly notes that the only other member of the congressional Democratic caucus who praises McCain this much is Joe Lieberman, a man not exactly popular with Democrats these days, but then, he was the party’s vice presidential nominee eight years ago. Who knows? He could be again – she could do that, to prove something or other. But Benen points to Christopher Orr’s comment:
There are certain lines that you do not cross in a primary campaign. And one of those is suggesting that your primary opponent, the likely nominee, is so unfit that that the Republican nominee might be preferable to him. This is spoiler territory, and Clinton should be ashamed.
Benen:
The dynamics have changed, and Obama’s hold on the frontrunner label is more tenuous, but the point remains the same - a leading Democratic candidate shouldn’t keep praising the leading Republican candidate in order to attack a fellow Dem.
This is not only divisive; it helps the other team. If Clinton wants to argue that she’s better qualified on national security issues, great, make the case. But this is the worst possible way of making the argument.
And he says Greg Sargent gets it:
Pumping up McCain to this extent risks provoking a backlash from rank-and-file Dems. The question I have is whether Obama will be able to capitalize on this, perhaps by using it to further his efforts to tie Hillary to McCain and to present himself as the only real candidate capable of drawing a clear contrast with him.
It seems like a fairly obvious avenue for criticism. We’ll see if Obama takes it.
We’ll see. Maybe he will. But so far, as discussed elsewhere, this praise for McCain and the insults and attacks on Obama, has lead many pundits to say she’s being savvy, even if she’s generating material for attack ads on Obama should he get the nomination – she’s painted Obama as a weakling on the defensive over all sorts of things, and, because she’s messed with his head, and made him fire his advisor Samantha Power, she’s finally found what it takes to win this thing.
Our friend, the high-powered Wall Street attorney, disagrees:
It seems many if not all of the commentators see Hillary for what she is. If the media have any impact on the process (as opposed to reporting about the process) then one has to assume that there is a backlash in the offing - perhaps as early as today. If Obama personifies the mood of the majority, which certainly appears to be the case by various measures including money raised, number of states won (including Texas as turns out to be the case), and actual delegates won, then Clinton cannot help but eventually implode. I think Obama is doing exactly the right thing. Firing Power is only a matter of perception (the word people should be using, rather than “optics”). She is still part of the equation and will be part of the Obama administration.
As for her creating the attack ads for McCain, I’m not sure even that is such a bad thing. Obama will hone his message in response to these attacks by Hillary to the point that by the time of the general election, the battle with McCain will be a cakewalk.
The bottom line is that I don’t think it’s time to throw in the towel just yet.
The reply sent back east:
What you’re proposing is that Clinton has, as they say out here in Hollywood, jumped the shark. The counterargument is that, understanding the risk of that, the danger of such attacks is less than what you gain - making Obama look weak and unable to fight back. That is what you hear from her folks now - Obama can’t stand the heat and thus he’s a useless candidate, the Republicans will destroy him, while she can take a punch and hit back even harder. The argument is that you want someone who knows how to play the game, not someone who comes to a knife fight and wants to talk. That is the strategy, as far as I can tell. And there is reason to think it will work just fine.
I drove around yesterday listening to Air America. It seemed every caller was ready, if Clinton got the nomination, to sit out the election, or to work against her - and caller after caller was now sending more money to Obama or going to go to work for his folks. Clinton has lost these people.
So? Her campaign has, of course, written them off. They’re going for the angry blue-collar folks, the elderly, those with little education, those who don’t follow the news - the people who don’t like detail. There are far more of them. So Obama will be the Adlai Stevenson of our generation.
But you never know….
Rick, the New Guy in Atlanta, goes the other way:
Re a Clinton imminent implosion: I totally agree. Josh Marshall thinks this Clinton stuff is working? Not if the numbers are a guide! To me, she looks like some boxer that is so flustered, she’s out there swinging wildly, possibly in danger of knocking herself out. And the judges think she must be winning because Obama isn’t fighting back? Why should he get in the way of her making a total fool of herself! Those judges are nuts!
To his credit, Obama is not throwing punches - and that makes it harder for her to demonstrate that she can take them. And none of her punches seem to land, for what that’s worth, since those of us who aren’t looking for a mud wrestler in a president don’t care about that sort of thing anyway. I suppose I might agree it might work, except that Obama seems to be winning the race by the numbers so far.
She’s looking like a slugger who is more a danger to herself than to her opponent. I’m just amazed some people are impressed with her act; I can’t help but think she’s losing more followers than gaining by acting like a jerk.
One man’s jerk may be another man’s hero, of course (see George Bush, the Iraq War). The Clinton strategists seem to think people like Rick and our attorney friend are in the minority. Perhaps they have internal polling showing how this plays out with primary voters – fifty-one percent say hero, forty-nine percent say jerk, so it works.
But then, she does have that special experience, as also discussed here – but that discussion was general. Perhaps looking into the specifics of how she handles crises would be useful. She has claimed she brought peace to Northern Ireland, brokered border matters in Kosovo, and negotiated human rights issues with the Chinese.
Who knew? Rick didn’t and referred us to this CNN fact-check item (Rick was part of the team that got CNN up and running back in 1980, of course):
The short version is, her claim of having “helped to bring peace to Northern Ireland” apparently involved bringing in women’s groups, as well as she and her husband having a late-night meeting with Gerry Adams, and she may have attended another meeting about IRA disarmament; her claim of having “negotiated open borders to let fleeing refugees into safety from Kosovo” isn’t clear, since the borders had already been opened by the time she met with Macedonian leaders; her claim of standing up for human rights in China may be little more than having made a human rights speech in Beijing in 1995.
She may have much more actual involvement in her husband’s administration than this, but it’s hard to tell from the public record, since so many of the papers have been locked away and are unavailable to public scrutiny.
In her role as First Lady, she travelled around the world representing her husband’s administration. To me, that’s standard first lady stuff, but shouldn’t count for much in terms of qualifications for the presidency. There were probably hundreds of junior State Department operatives during that time that have far more direct input in these and other foreign policy matters than Hillary Clinton, but who wouldn’t for a second argue that this qualifies them to become President. In fact, Barack Obama was elected to office in 1997, when Hillary was still technically a housewife, so in a sense, his experience as a public servant in elective office precedes her.
Not that I think “experience” is everything anyway, it’s just that I do think she’s been embellishing her resume a bit too much on this score.
But then padding your résumé is an American tradition. The trouble is it can catch up with you, on the job. It’s dangerous.
The Chicago Tribune followed CNN by examining what exactly Clinton’s experience really seems to be. And the business with the Macedonia-Kosovo and Northern Ireland claims are what they examine:
Pressed in a CNN interview this week for specific examples of foreign policy experience that has prepared her for an international crisis, Clinton claimed that she “helped to bring peace” to Northern Ireland and negotiated with Macedonia to open up its border to refugees from Kosovo.
Andrew Sullivan summarizes what they found – “Both claims are ludicrously untrue. All she did in Northern Ireland was have tea with some local peace activist women. Laura Bush could argue, by that token, that she has ended AIDS in Africa.”
The Tribune adds this – “The Macedonian government opened its border to refugees the day before Clinton arrived to meet with government leaders.” Oops.
Sullivan:
Clinton has next to no foreign policy experience. And no executive experience. She has less legislative experience than Obama. And she has not just exaggerated, but flat-out lied, about her non-achievements. I’m glad the Tribune has done this. Can the rest of media follow up?
Maybe they will, but you don’t want to burn your bridges with the next administration – modern political reporting depends on having well-placed inside sources who will to go off-record and tell you what’s really going on. Ask Judith Miller late of the New York Times – no, wait, bad example. Still, there’s no percentage in reporting that she’s lying about her experience. Even if you’re right, even if you have the actual facts nailed down, who need the hassle? You don’t use the word liar – and you don’t make fun of her.
You have to leave that, as we see in the Telegraph (UK), to foreigners:
Hillary Clinton had no direct role in bringing peace to Northern Ireland and is a “wee bit silly” for exaggerating the part she played, according to Lord Trimble of Lisnagarvey, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and former First Minister of the province.
She didn’t author that Good Friday agreement? But Lord Trimble didn’t call her a lair, only “wee bit silly.” Actually that sounds worse.
And there’s David Trimble, former First Minister of Northern Ireland on her claim that she “helped bring peace to Northern Ireland” way back when:
I don’t know there was much she did apart from accompanying Bill [Clinton] going around. She visited when things were happening, saw what was going on, she can certainly say it was part of her experience. I don’t want to rain on the thing for her but being a cheerleader for something is slightly different from being a principal player.
Okay, now you have a “wee bit silly” cheerleader, and Trimble seems to feel sorry for her – he doesn’t really want to rain on her parade. That’s very British – condescending and dismissive, and ever so politely mean and cutting. Those Brits have such clever ways of saying what we’d say differently – Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire!
She didn’t author that Good Friday agreement. And here we find Susan Rice, an Obama advisor, pointing out that one of the men who did author that Good Friday agreement, George Mitchell, is on record saying she was “not involved directly.” It is too bad people don’t attend to detail, but it’s good for her.
Does this matter?
Josh Marshall here says “she doesn’t need to be a seasoned foreign policy hand. But she’s setting herself up for a fall when she claims to be.” Yep, lie on your résumé and you can get in trouble. You really are setting yourself up for a fall – unless you have a fabulous career and the truth comes out only after you have retired in comfort to the Caymans.
Matthew Yglesias makes an interesting observation:
Clinton would, like Barack Obama, and most modern presidents (Ike, Nixon, and GHWB being the big counterexamples) have little experience with running foreign policy. But she feels compelled to lie about it.
So experience really doesn’t matter then, really, but she has that compulsion to lie.
Why is that? F. F. Bosworth long ago put it this way – “It is my settled opinion, after some years as a political correspondent, that no one is attracted to a political career in the first place unless he is socially or emotionally crippled.”
Maybe that’s it.
