First Door on the Left

I will say this about the feigned furor over Barack Obama’s truthful statement about frustrated and bitter voters in small-town America: It certainly served to divert everybody’s attention from this story (I have to say that I seriously question the timing, considering Senator Obama made his statement last weekend)…

Bill Clinton Revives the Bosnia Gaffe Lie

Bill Clinton

From Politics 101: Don’t revive a controversy that your wife’s campaign is trying to lay to rest.

Bill Clinton, who is often called one of the savviest politicians of his generation, may have missed that particular lesson. Or perhaps he was just a forgetful 60-something.

Either way, he did Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign no favors Thursday when he brought up her recent misstatements about being under sniper fire in Bosnia.

Not only did he resurrect a subject that his wife no doubt wishes everyone would forget, but he rushed to her defense with a series of inaccuracies. He also suggested that his wife, who is running for president in part on her preparedness to handle emergencies in the middle of the night, might have forgotten details of the incident because she was 60, forgetful and tired.

“When they’re 60,” he said of reporters who, he believes, have overdramatized the episode, “they’ll forget something when they’re tired at 11 o’clock at night, too.”[..]

Mr. Clinton’s remarks on Thursday were an effort to explain his wife’s comments from February and again in March that in 1996, when she was first lady, she had visited Bosnia under sniper fire. But news photography and eyewitness accounts showed no sniper fire, and Mrs. Clinton had to back off her account of the episode, which she had used to bolster her foreign policy credentials. In backtracking, she said she had been tired when she related the story and, after all, she was only human.

Even as the issue faded from the headlines and the Clinton campaign tried to move on, public opinion polls showed that it had taken a toll with voters, who increasingly said Mrs. Clinton was untrustworthy.

Mr. Clinton, friends say, has been anxious to defend his wife and is also seething — as are many in her campaign — at what he perceives as media bias against his wife.

“A lot of the way this whole campaign has been covered has amused me,” Mr. Clinton said at a campaign stop Thursday in Boonville, Ind., wagging his finger. “But there was a lot of fulminating because Hillary, one time late at night when she was exhausted, misstated — and immediately apologized for it — what happened to her in Bosnia in 1995. Did y’all see all that? Oh, they blew it up.”

(For the record: Mrs. Clinton did not make the misstatements “one time late at night” but at least twice, on Feb. 29 and March 17, both times during the day. She did not apologize immediately but on March 24. She was in Bosnia in 1996, not 1995.)

Nice move, Clintonistas. You have my sincere congratulations.

Tags: 2008, Bosnia, Democrats, Hillary Clinton, presidential campaign