Just Above Sunset

“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.” ~ F. F. Bosworth

In Slate, Melinda Henneberger, asks an interesting question – “What if Hillary believes her Tuzla tale, even now?”

Henneberger is still thinking about what she calls that tall tale from Tuzla – dodging sniper fire on a trip to the Balkans that was too dangerous for her husband to take, as you don’t want to endanger the President of the United States, after all. Many still wonder about that. That she was accompanied by her teenage daughter and the comic, Sinbad, made the whole tale even more bizarre. It wasn’t long before the video clips were all over the news. No such thing happened. There was documentary proof in this case – hard evidence, as it were.

Henneberger is worried about this sort of thing – “As we look to November, surely we can agree that the last thing we need in the Oval Office is another escapee from the reality-based community.”

But then it’s clear that each of the presidential candidates has escaped from reality a bit. Henneberger simply thinks that, while noting this, as it is instructive to do so, one ought not to lump things in together:

They all lie and so are all alike? No, because they lie differently.

She notes that John McCain keeps saying – three times and counting – that Iran is arming al Qaeda, and that’s what’s wrong in Iraq. But Iran, the Shiite country, and al Qaeda, the Sunni terrorist group, are enemies. So McCain is lying, or befuddled:

Which is worrying as a practical matter; if national security is McCain’s strong suit, and he can’t keep this straight, that’s way more unfortunate than a derriere-covering fib about whether he really meant we might be fighting in Iraq 100 years from now.  

And it’s clear he only meant we’d be in Iraq for a hundred years as much-loved and pleasant guests, and allies, in our permanent bases there, like in Korea and Germany. Still, it would be nice if he kept the bad guys straight. 

And Henneberger is none too happy with Barack Obama initially suggesting that “some of his longtime preacher’s more objectionable rants were news to him.” That just wasn’t true. And there’s this: 

He was also busted recently for claiming that he owes his very existence to the Kennedys, who at one point financially supported the program that brought his Kenyan father to the United States. When I heard Obama say that in Selma, Ala., last year, it seemed such a reach that it never even occurred to me that he meant it literally. And sure enough, by the time the Kennedys became benefactors of the program, Obama Sr. was already living in Hawaii. 

So they each have problems, most recently with Hillary Clinton and that uninsured pregnant woman Clinton kept saying died after she was refused medical care. The Ohio hospital asked her to stop that, as it wasn’t true – the woman was insured and was not turned away. Henneberger: 

Now, that’s credulous and predictable and incredibly bad staff work - modern parables require fact-checking, people! - but it’s more embarrassing than disqualifying.  

And anyway, it sort of was true: 

Clinton erred in telling audiences that the Ohio woman lacked insurance when seeking help for her troubled pregnancy. But according to Casto’s account, Bachtel’s medical tragedy began with circumstances very close to the essence of Clinton’s now-abandoned account: the lack of insurance created a $100 barrier to needed medical attention close to home. 

So you could call that a wash. There’s much more from Digby here – Clinton’s staff may have let her down, or maybe not, but the press did gang up on her over this. 

Henneberger also notes Hillary’s insistence that she spoke out against the war before Obama did, in 2005 choosing her dates carefully – “This is incorrect and hard to see as anything other than an attempt to one-up her rival.” 

But what gets her goat is that tall tale from Tuzla, because Clinton really did seem to believe it: 

I say this because I cannot for the life of me imagine why any presidential candidate would knowingly cook up such a doozy of a drama about dodging a sniper’s bullets in Bosnia - given that she was accompanied on this trip by a planeload of reporters. (Who, alas, left it to the comedian Sinbad to correct the record. But she couldn’t have counted on that, could she?)  

No, I think she must have bought into her own imagined heroics -and might be still. Her suggestion on Leno - “This has been such a mismatch of words and actions” - that she’s been in so many war zones she’s lost track not only doesn’t add up but makes things worse, not better. As Christopher Hitchens noted, running across a tarmac in fear for your life is not an experience anyone could ever forget. (And if it did happen elsewhere, then where?)  

Henneberger says this should be a deal-breaker: 

Because if anything, it’s even more serious if she did believe her own story - in keeping, I’m afraid, with her whole history of improving upon the truth of her difficult childhood, her difficult marriage, and now, her difficult candidacy. Hillary has famously said that there are worse things than adultery, and there are worse things than lying, too. Like not knowing when you aren’t telling the truth.  

That is a problem. Being delusional should be disqualifying. And being delusional can anger people. As mentioned by both Andrew Sullivan and Ben Smith, it angered Spike Lee: 

The Clintons, man, they would lie on a stack of Bibles. Snipers? That’s not misspeaking; that’s some pure bullshit. I voted for Clinton twice, but that’s over with. These old black politicians say, “Ooh, Massuh Clinton was good to us, massuh hired a lot of us, massuh was good!”  

Hoo! Charlie Rangel, David Dinkins - they have to understand this is a new day. People ain’t feelin’ that stuff. It’s like a tide, and the people who get in the way are just gonna get swept out into the ocean. 

Hillary Clinton has had a bad time of it. But why should this be? 

Edward McClelland may offer a hint in his Salon item, How 1968 changed Hillary – “The former Goldwater Girl became a member of the Democratic Party’s new vanguard. But that’s not how many liberals see her today.” 

McClelland may offer far too much background information, but this paragraph is instructive: 

Just four years earlier, Hillary had been a suburban Goldwater Girl, wearing a 10-gallon hat adorned with the candidate’s catchphrase - AuH2O - and devouring “The Conscience of a Conservative,” the Arizona senator’s campaign biography, the way some young people take to the me-first bromides of Ayn Rand. The story of her conversion from high school Republican to Seven Sisters campus liberal is the story of how the Democratic Party was gentrified in the 1960s, its lunch-bucket rank and file making way for college-educated professionals consumed with issues of civil rights and unjust wars. And its ironic coda is that Hillary Clinton, once one of the activist newcomers, now depends for her electoral survival on reviving the party’s old blue-collar base. 

It seems she comes from a long line of troubled Republicans, with real issues, and she has issues of her own. Who knew? She’s a complicated person. She’s torn. 

But we’re used to that. Also in Slate you might want to read Juliet Lapidos with the Hollywood beat – Oliver Stone Takes On George W. Bush.  

This is, yes, an advance look at Bush, the movie, if you will. Oliver Stone, the man who gave us JFK (1991) and Nixon (1995), and Wall Street (1987) and Platoon (1986), is giving is W. (2009). An early draft has been leaked to ABC and people are talking – Lapidos has the links. But Lapidos also now has a copy of the screenplay, dated October 15, 2007. Stone’s tagline – “How did Bush go from being an alcoholic bum to the most powerful figure in the world?” 

The following comments from Lapidos are instructive (you may find your own favorites if you read the Lapidos item – your mileage may vary): 

Pages 48-51: A “slightly snockered” W. nearly kills his friend Don Evans during a joy ride in a Cessna jet. Evans gets worried when the jet begins to wobble and shake; he asks W., “Tell the truth - this is the first time you’ve ever flown a Cessna, isn’t it?” W.’s response: “This is how you learn. By doing. No need to ask a million questions.” Could this scene, which ends with the plane spinning out of control and landing in a desert, be a metaphor for W.’s learn-by-doing approach to war? 

Pages 74-75: When British Prime Minister Tony Blair says he’s concerned about “sectarian violence in the aftermath” of an Iraq invasion, W. tries to reassure him: “They’ll be grateful for freedom, the last thing they’ll want’s ‘nother war. Sunnis, Shias, Kurds, you know, in the end they’ll stick together, they’re all Muslims, anyway, (chuckling) and they gotta pray five times a day.” 

Everyone has issues. Politicians have more than their share. 

It’s just that we all pay for their issues. Scott Horton here reviews the results from the new George Mason University - History News Network report – historians once again deciding that Bush is the worst president ever, only this time around it’s even more lopsided. Of one hundred nine historians sixty-one percent now rank Bush as “worst ever” among all presidents. The numbers are climbing, and there’s this comment: 

“No individual president can compare to the second Bush,” wrote one. “Glib, contemptuous, ignorant, incurious, a dupe of anyone who humors his deluded belief in his heroic self, he has bankrupted the country with his disastrous war and his tax breaks for the rich, trampled on the Bill of Rights, appointed foxes in every henhouse, compounded the terrorist threat, turned a blind eye to torture and corruption and a looming ecological disaster, and squandered the rest of the world’s goodwill. In short, no other president’s faults have had so deleterious an effect on not only the country but the world at large.” 

But he has issues. Oliver Stone will put them on screen. 

Matthew Yglesias, however, suggests Bush shouldn’t worry: 

American presidents associated with big dramatic events tend to wind up with good reputations whether they deserve them or not. One possible Bush analogy would be to Woodrow Wilson, who did all kinds of things with regard to civil liberties that look indefensible today and whose foreign policy ended as a giant failure, but who was associated with both big events and with big ideas that were influential down the road. Someday, I bet there will be democracies in the Middle East and some future Republican president will figure out a way to put meat on the bones of “compassionate conservatism” and Bush will be looked upon as a far-sighted figure who made some mistakes in a difficult period of time.  

Will he deserve a good reputation? No. Will he get one? I’d say yes.  

And Bush really doesn’t matter now. Unless he declares a national emergency and appoints himself President for Life, having stuffed the courts and turned the military, he’ll be gone soon – and we’ll have the troubled Hillary in charge of things. 

McCain might pull off a win, but he has too many flaws – earnest and noble befuddlement is just not that appealing. And Clinton could win her logic games with the Democratic Party. Everyone seems to be talking about Sean Wilentz arguing here in Salon that if the Democratic primary operated on a winner-take-all basis – he says that’s “one of the central principles of American electoral politics” - Hillary Clinton would be ahead. You see, it quite simple – “In a popular-vote winner-take-all system, Clinton would now have 1,743 pledged delegates to Obama’s 1,257.” You see, Obama has a lead that is “reliant on certain eccentricities in the current Democratic nominating process.” It’s all how you look at it. 

Jonathan Chait will have none of this, in If My Grandmother Had Wheels Clinton Would Be Winning: 

Indeed, in this case, winner-take-all would have made the Democratic primary less democratic. Obama is winning the popular vote. He’s even winning if you count the vote in Florida, where neither candidate campaigned or organized their voters. (A restriction that benefitted Clinton enormously, as greater familiarity has boosted Obama’s standing virtually everywhere - witness the withering away of Clinton’s once-massive lead in Pennsylvania.) 

Why, then, would Clinton be leading under a winner-take-all system? Because a winner-take-all system renders a one-vote win in a state just as valuable as a blowout win. One flaw of a winner-take-all state-based process is that a candidate who has more votes can lose if he has lots of “wasted” votes in blowout wins and his opponent has many close victories. And indeed, this is precisely what’s happened in the Democratic primary - Obama has far more blowout wins. As Third Way’s Jim Kessler has pointed out, “Twenty-four of his 29 wins have been by 16 points or more, while four of Clinton’s 15 victories have been of the blowout variety.” Clinton would win by the winner-take-all metric only because it’s a system that can mask the popular will. 

So Wilentz is arguing that if the Democrats used a different, less democratic process, Clinton would be winning despite Obama’s greater appeal to the electorate.  

It’s all delusion. And there’s no odd twist from bad rules going on here: 

It’s not just an accident that Obama won a lot of delegates from blowout wins in small states. It’s a deliberate strategy. In the days leading up to Super Tuesday, he abandoned big states like California to hold rallies in places like Boise, Idaho and Wilmington, Delaware. Obama did this because there were lots of delegates to be gained by increasing his margin in small states. If the rules were different, he would have deployed his resources differently. 

But delusions persist: 

Clinton supporters are spending an inordinate amount of time devising scenarios where Clinton would be winning if the rules of the primary were changed retroactively. Yet all the rules were understood and agreed to by both candidates in advance. The rules are not perfect, but the hypothetical alternatives proposed by Clinton’s side - imposing a winner-take-all system, counting the votes in states with no campaigning or only one candidate on the ballot - would make the race less fair, not more fair. 

So, yes, it’s possible to imagine different, less-fair rules where the losing candidate would have prevailed. But so what? 

Still, delusions persist. See Hillary Clinton spokesman Phil Singer, responding to a February 19 Politico article stating that the Clinton campaign would try to “flip” pledged Obama delegates who were chosen by primary and caucus voters: 

We have not, are not and will not pursue the pledged delegates of Barack Obama.  

See ABC News on April 5: 

Sen. Hillary Clinton made a blunt appeal to North Dakota delegates to switch their support to her, despite the fact that Sen. Barack Obama handily defeated her in the state’s caucus in February. 

…Clinton made it clear to North Dakota Democrats last night that she believes there is no such thing as a pledged delegate and highlighted that stubborn streak in her appeal for delegates to switch from Obama to her when the Democratic national party holds its nominating convention this August. 

… “I am here tonight because I am seeking your support,” Clinton said, adding that she never gives up. 

She sort of makes a liar of her own spokesman. She’s in another world. Oliver stone can make the movie in 2016 or so. 

How far out is she? Jonathan Chait runs that down, in the New Republic:  

Almost nobody contends that Clinton has a chance to overcome Obama’s lead in pledged delegates. The spin now is that Obama’s delegate lead is “small but almost insurmountable” (USA Today) and that, since neither can clinch the nomination with pledged delegates alone, “the nomination is expected to be in the superdelegates’ hands” (Los Angeles Times). These beliefs reflect the mathematical illiteracy that has allowed the press corps to be routinely duped by economic flim-flammery. A lead that’s insurmountable is, by definition, not small. The very primary rules that make it impossible for Clinton to catch up - proportionate distribution of delegates that award tiny net sums to the winner - are exactly what made Obama’s lead so impressive. 

The notion that the superdelegates will decide the race implies that pledged delegates won’t matter - like a sports event that goes to overtime. Obviously, though, the pledged-delegate count determines how many superdelegates each candidate needs. Depending on how the remaining primaries go, Clinton will need about two-thirds of the uncommitted ones to break her way. Problem is, over the last month, superdelegates have broken to Obama by 78 percent to 22 percent. 

But delusions can end. See John Dickerson in Slate on the moment presidential candidates know it’s time to go, with Finding the Exit. It’s not pretty. But it’s all about her. 

Obama keeps on going, ahead in the race, fending off all the people who don’t like what his wife or his pastor said, with things like this: 

I love this country not because it’s perfect, but because we’ve always been able to move it closer to perfection. Because through revolution and slavery; war and depression; great battles for civil rights and women’s rights and worker’s rights, generations of Americans have shown their love of country by struggling and sacrificing and risking their lives to bring us that much closer to our founding promise. And as long as I live, I will never forget that I am only standing here because they did… That is the country I love. That is the promise of America. 

Almost a year ago he said this: 

[Obama] referred to the anniversary of the March on Selma, how he went and how he came back and someone (I don’t remember who now) said to him: “That was a great celebration of African-American history.”  

To which Obama said he replied: “No, no, no, no, no. That was not a great celebration of African-American history. That was a celebration of American history.”  

Everyone has delusions.