Asked about his Bosnia gaffe today in Terra Haute, Indiana during a visit to the charred remains of his wife’s local campaign headquarters, which burned down last night, Bill Clinton finally said something that made sense:
I’ll let people who actually were there and knew what happened to talk about it. But I think the fact that Hillary made a factual error in her account and acknowledged it shouldn’t obscure the fact that she did go into an area not free of danger and was there advocating for the troops… I regret that people like you [reporters] care more about that than whether she served the troops, and whether she’ll put people back to work and whether she’ll do the best job of getting people out of Iraq… Let’s don’t make one more mountain out of a molehill when the facts are pretty clear.
If your goal is to show how the gotcha, 24/7 media can distort reality beyond all recognition, this strikes me as an infinitely more intelligent strategy than spitting out an error-riddled–and easily debunked–revision of the whole Tulza debacle. The truth is, Bill has a point. He should’ve admitted from the start that he isn’t familiar with the details (instead of conjuring them out of thin air). But I’ve always thought our national obsession with “sniper fire” was sort of childish. The presence of a bullet or two doesn’t change the fact that, as First Lady, Hillary did insist on visiting a combat zone and supporting the soldiers in person, and it’s hard to see how that’s not a relevant (and even, on balance, beneficial) experience–whether or not you think it should ultimately help qualify her to be president.
Of course, it was Hillary who was juvenile first. When she embellished her story with sniper fire, she implied, in effect, that being shot at somehow made her more prepared for the presidency than not being shot at. At that point, “people like [me]”–i.e.,reporters–were duty-bound to report on her distortion. Still, the underlying reality is that, as Bill explained, “she did go into an area not free of danger and was there advocating for the troops.” I don’t blame him for wanting to point that out–even if delivering a completely unprompted, completely bogus account of the controversy was probably the worst imaginable way to do it.
That clumsiness–or destructiveness, depending on how psychoanalytical you want to get–is exactly why Bill doesn’t make always make the best of surrogates. Apparently, Hillary agrees. As Bill put it this afternoon in Terra Haute, “Hillary called me and said ‘You don’t remember this. You weren’t there, let me handle it.’” His response? “Yes ma’am.” Next time, she might want to try a muzzle.
