Tag Archives: Hillary Clinton

Who sent the bombs to Obama officials?

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I am very curious to know who mailed the homemade-looking manila-envelope bombs to President Obama and the others. It is too soon for an affirmative theory. CNN and MSNBC instantaneously call President Trump the common denominator, also emphasize that the bomb addressed to Brennan was sent to CNN.

I hope all the bombs have been recovered. So far, there are two (actual) common denominators, besides the person who sent the bombs.

Bombs found so far were addressed to former President Barack Obama; his Attorney General, Eric Holder; his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton; and his CIA head, John Brennan. The others were addressed to California Democratic congress member Maxine Waters, an Obama supporter; and major Democratic donor George Soros, an Obama supporter.

[UPDATE Thursday: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/25/robert-de-niros-nyc-restaurant-reportedly-receives-suspected-mail-bomb-similar-to-those-sent-to-top-democrats-and-cnn.html 

  • Explosive devices similar to ones sent to prominent Democrats earlier this week was sent to actor Robert De Niro and former vice president Joe Biden, according to media reports.

So the list of Obama officials is now further filled in with President Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden. De Niro famously stumped for Obama.]

Image result for De Niro mail

The other common denominator is Florida congress member Debbie Wasserman Schultz. All the packages have her as their bogus return address.

How the Democrats keep losing. 2017, part 4.

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How the Democrats keep losing. The most recent addition to this exhibition–probably not the last–is now installed. Georgia’s 6th congressional district went for Republican Karen Handel. In no way was this a surprise, as far as I am concerned. See previous posts on this topic here and here. (Yes, it is time for the I-told-you-so’s.)

The final outcome wasn’t all that much of a squeaker, either. Unofficial results from the Georgia Secretary of State’s website give Handel 51.87 percent of the vote to Jon Ossoff’s 48.13 percent, a margin of almost four points. The end was apparent by 10 p.m. on election night. Handel won by almost 10,000 votes–a not inconsiderable number in a congressional district.

For further perspective, compare the outcome to that of South Carolina’s special election, the same night. Very similar: the Republican candidate, Ralph Norman, won, and by about the same margin. Unofficial results from the South Carolina State Election Commission give Norman 51.10 percent of the vote to 47.88 percent for Democrat Archie Parnell. If you do the arithmetic with close attention, Parnell did slightly better percentage-wise than Ossoff.

Parnell

In other words, the Democratic candidate in South Carolina did slightly better, though still losing, than the Democratic candidate in Georgia. Is this in spite of the attention paid to ‘flipping’ Georgia during the 2016 election cycle–or because of it?

My working hypothesis is the latter.

More national attention means more money, and more money went to Georgia, as everyone on Earth knows. Googling the phrase ‘the most expensive House race in U.S. history’ turns up 6.5 million results. The non-profit, non-partisan OpenSecrets.org has posted a substantial run-down on dollar amounts as of June 19. As of the day before the special election, at least $56 million had been spent. At that time, the NRCC had spent somewhat more than the DCCC, both pouring millions into the race. The NRCC was playing some catch-up ball; Ossoff was the beneficiary of highly-touted donations and campaign appearances by Hollywood celebrities and others from before the April 18th round of the special election.

But what looks like a national bandwagon of bi-coastal celebrities is not the same as a local landslide. In fact, it is not the same as a local win. It does not translate into a local win.

Even money coming in is not everything.

Compare the money spent on the South Carolina special election to that spent on the Georgia special election. As Open Secrets notes in the same article, by May 31 a grand total of $2.06 million had been raised by Norman and Parnell for the South Carolina race, partly in loans to their campaigns by the candidates themselves. The South Carolina total thus comes to about three percent of the Georgia total.

So–same margin of loss for the Democrats, at three percent of the price? And that’s before the final numbers are all in. There is no reason to expect that the cost ratio of the two elections will narrow after final FEC reports.

Leaning over backward here, I have to mention that voter turnout was better in Georgia, significantly better. South Carolina reports 18.25 percent turnout in its special; Georgia reports turnout of 57.97 percent. Any analyst would say that topping 50 percent in an off-year election, or in a midterm election, let alone a special, is outstanding.

However–more money coming in, with more national attention, also means more outsiderism. Jon Ossoff may not have been a total carpetbagger, but he was no home-grown favorite son, either. His negatives were slight but telling–living outside the district, for example–and not palliated by his fudging the distance he lived away. More importantly, Ossoff’s candidacy was not the organic product of community action, or activism. He had a successful career in media and the potential to attract big money. Thus Ossoff was the hand-picked choice of Dems who thought They Were the Ones Who Knew the Score, in Georgia and more outside it.

Thus he tacitly reinforced the perception of rigged elections. Republicans kept tying him to ‘Nancy Pelosi’, but the real damage is that Ossoff’s candidacy was a pale reflection of Hillary Clinton’s. No choice. That’s the Democratic message: We’re the one for you, and when we say ‘one’, we mean it.

I have no  strong hope that writers for either Daily Kos or Rachel Maddow will ever perceive the gut unpopularity of this strategy.

We’re already seeing the fall-out from the special elections in ‘progressive’ public discourse. Short form:

Argument over ‘moving to the left’ misses the point in a big way.

Argument over ‘party leadership’ also probably misses the point.

Candidates win in their own districts. Local talent has to run. Popular, well-liked local talent has to run. And genuine liking comes from having worked for, on behalf of, the people you live among. The hysterical careerists who seem to dominate the Democratic Party nationally have yet to pick up on this.

As to making elections a ‘Referendum on Trump’? Losing strategy. I said so before. Going TrumpTrumpTrump as Hillary Clinton did generates the same outcome Clinton got, or created. Furthermore, making congressional elections a ‘referendum on Trump’ ignores the concerns of the congressional district. It is also basically a form of telling people how stupid they are. (Who are you to have your own opinions or preferences?) Telling people how stupid they are/were may give self-anointed insiders a feeling of power for a few minutes, but it is both mean and a loser. That makes it 0 for 2 in my book.

Meanwhile, the hysteria poured into the Georgia Special sucked away resources that could have gone into home foreclosures, or inmate abuse, or immigrants preyed upon by other immigrants, or the backlog of unprocessed rape kits. If the Democrats would work on these and other issues at home, and would do genuine work, they would be seen doing so.

Not that winning is everything. But losing isn’t anything.

Told you so.

 

 

Wasn’t Hillary Clinton going to fire Comey?

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This is the kind of observation that makes some people flap their hands and dismiss ‘What-ifs’, but if Hillary Clinton had been elected to the White House, wasn’t she going to fire the FBI’s James B. Comey?

Comey’s July 5, 2016, press conference was criticized across the political spectrum. Comey announced that Clinton would not be prosecuted for her private email server–but he also castigated her “extremely careless” handling of classified information, informed the public that there were indeed some top secret emails on the server, and said that none of them should have been kept on an unclassified system.

Comey, Clinton in 2016

Valid points, as far as they went, but criticism has continued from then to now.

No reason Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein should be special, or left out. The July 5 presentation forms part of Rosenstein’s reason for recommending that Comey be fired. Read the Rosenstein memo here, helpfully published in full by the British Independent.

Ironies abound. Comey’s head was on the chopping block if Clinton got into the White House. That might or might not be a good thing, depending on your judgment of Comey’s over-all track record. The point here is that there has been little comment on this in reaction to Comey’s firing. In fact, there was little comment on it amidst all the media motive-hunting about Comey’s remarks eleven days before the 2016 election. The question was not raised with then-candidate Clinton then: if elected, do you plan to keep Comey on? At the time, most pundits were too busy vilifying Comey even to urge that she fire him. The gap is a little odder when you recall that they were all convinced that Clinton was indeed going to be in the White House. Did they deliberately not raise a question because they thought it might cost her voters? Or did it genuinely not occur to them?

The follow-up question for Clinton: with Comey gone, whom would she choose for FBI director? I can’t remember the speculation or even remember the question being discussed. (Admittedly, MSNBC was so insufferable–We’ve got the whip hand now!–that I had tuned out by then.) Speaking of motive-hunting, I can’t remember whether Rosenstein was considered a candidate.

But that kind of speculation is counter-productive right now. Amidst a media snowstorm blanketing Comey’s firing with the ‘Russia investigation’, what I’m noticing is that Rosenstein’s memo is surprisingly well written:

The Director was wrong to usurp the Attorney General’s authority on July 5, 2016, and announce his conclusion that the case should be closed without prosecution. It is not the function of the Director to make such an announcement. At most, the Director should have said the FBI had completed its investigation and presented its findings to federal prosecutors.

The explanation of FBI protocol, i.e. U. S. law, here does not sound like just smokescreen, pretext for firing Comey over ‘Russia’:

The Director now defends his decision by asserting that he believed Attorney General Loretta had a conflict. But the FBI Director is never empowered to supplant federal prosecutors and assume command of the Justice Department. There is a well-established process for other officials to step in when a conflict requires the recusal of the Attorney General. On July 5, however, the Director announced his own conclusions about the nation’s most sensitive criminal investigation, without the authorization of duly appointed Justice Department leaders.

Not to pile on Jim Comey at the moment, but I never thought the Attorney General had a conflict, or at least not one that necessitated Comey’s taking the pulpit. Every U.S. Attorney General is a political appointee. All of them, going back to Edmund Randolph, have landed in situations of political delicacy at least equivalent to Loretta Lynch’s.

And as Rosenstein’s memo points out, when an official has to recuse himself/herself, someone can fill in. Often that would be the next in command, a deputy–not Rosenstein, who was appointed to his current position in January–but Sally Yates.

I have no idea whether Yates would have made the kind of announcement Comey made in July 2016. If she had announced that the email investigation was ended, presumably she would have worded the message differently. When Comey took the pulpit on July 5, the effect was to pre-empt Yates at least as much as Lynch.

The memo seems to raise a question whether the email investigation would have ended then, had Comey chosen differently:

The current FBI Director is an articulate and persuasive speaker about leadership and the immutable principles of the Department of Justice. He deserves our appreciation for his public service. As you and I have discussed, however, I cannot defend the Director’s handling of the conclusion of the investigation of Secretary Clinton’s emails, and I do not understand his refusal to accept the nearly universal judgment that he was mistaken. Almost everyone agrees that the Director made serious mistakes; it is one of the few issues that unites people of diverse perspectives.

This point has not gone entirely unnoticed. Almost, but not quite.

 

 

 

“What went wrong” in 2016? Are they kidding?

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Going where the denial is thickest–in the news media

As a rape survivor myself*, I believe Juanita Broaddrick. I listened to Ms. Broaddrick when she was interviewed on Dateline NBC back in 1999. I listened carefully to everything she said, and–as a lifelong registered Democrat myself–I believe her with all my heart. Her accusation was that Bill Clinton assaulted her, in Arkansas, years earlier, when he was State Attorney General and widely believed to be a rising political star and a local political wunderkind. This was a rape allegation–different in degree from the several sexual harassment allegations also leveled against Clinton, and in 2016 against Donald Trump, and very different from Clinton’s compulsive philandering. Broaddrick accused Clinton of forcible rape, on national television–network, not cable–credibly, with detail, not concealing or denying her own errors or her anger at Clinton. Yet after the Clintons left the White House, Broaddrick’s name was scarcely mentioned in what are often called the ‘elite’ media. As the highly respected late columnist William Blackberry commented, it was mystifying that a credible accusation of such magnitude could be passed over. This while The Washington Post deemed that President Clinton’s affair with an intern warranted a special pull-out section titled “Presidency in Crisis”( temporarily), and Republicans in the House were voting to impeach Clinton.

It is an unanswered question, now, how many people even know who Juanita Broaddrick is. Many younger people who voted in 2016 would not have recognized her name in 2015. The fact that she became part of the public discourse largely through some rightwing outlets and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is a source of regret for me personally.

The Democrats who should have acknowledged her story dropped the ball. So did the GOP, of course. Neither major party moved constructively to address the issue of rape, in the 1990s or under the George W. Bush administration. President Obama and Vice President Biden did more than any previous White House, addressing sexual assault on college campuses and problems such as the backlog of unprocessed rape kits in the criminal justice system. But much remains to be done.

Our top media outlets did far too little. Millions of words have been written about the 2016 election, with more to come; hundreds of opinion polls were taken, countless models predicted the outcome–wrongly–but so far as I know, no major media outlet polled the public on awareness of Juanita Broaddrick’s accusation against Clinton, or even on her name recognition.

A couple of points here. First, rape is a difficult topic, grim and painful, and difficult things by definition are harder to deal with than easy things. Fewer people will deal well with something difficult than with something easy, including people in the news media. Second,  as mentioned above, few people in large media outlets tried to deal with the Broaddrick story well. This gap is not consistent with a belief in Clinton’s innocence, which would have emphasized accuracy. It sweeps an issue under the rug instead of addressing it.

Third, a media focus on horse-race politics shed too little light on rape as an issue. Thus if Broaddrick’s name was mentioned at all, it was usually through the prism of possible effect on the campaign of Hillary Clinton for president. Those media personalities are now consumed with the question of ‘what went wrong’ with the 2016 election, and what went wrong with their predictions.

Conceding defeat in 2016

Conceding defeat in 2016

Democrats are also addressing the question of ‘what went wrong’, especially since the Clinton campaign is not telling.

And the Clintons are of course being faulted for not telling. On this narrow point, I can help them. This is a question they will not answer fully, because they cannot.

‘What went wrong’ is that the wife of a rapist ran for the White House.

Unthinkable? One would think so. But it wasn’t. There was no one to advise the Clintons, effectively, that Clinton should not run.  A deadly simple timeline resulted. The Clinton team decided to try the run and accumulated all the money not going to the GOP. Meanwhile, Republicans salivating at the prospect of running against ‘Hillary’ lined up, and money or no money, the GOP field was self-destructively large. Trump was the cue ball. Wham. He broke the rack on the table wide apart. And while Trump was breaking things open on the Republican side, the Clintons and their media allies were shutting out every better candidate on the Democratic side–Vice President Biden first, before the primary season even began; then Senator Bernie Sanders in the primaries.

So on one side Trump benefited from the arithmetic of the field, and on the other Clinton, with no essential constituency or platform except narrow self-interest, shut out the field.

Net result: 1) A small cadre of Democratic insiders decided to paste in a nominee before any votes were cast, and 2) they picked the worst possible candidate. The Clintons with their greed problem, their old-time insider status, their treatment-of-women problem, their ties to Wall Street, etc., etc., etc., were the worst possible choice to run against Donald Trump. Not that they knew enough to take Trump seriously, any more than they knew enough to take Sanders seriously. (So much for ‘electable’.) So much for the high-paid expertise with which they theoretically surrounded themselves.

I believe that even the quiet Lincoln Chafee would have done better than Clinton. Joe Biden would have crushed Trump. Bernie Sanders would have crushed Trump. But every political and/or media insider was convinced that Clinton was a shoo-in. And not content with being convinced themselves, they exerted pressures huge to tiny, broad and narrow, to exclude any contrary voice or dissenting opinion.

On a small scale, I saw a little of the action even near my own neighborhood. (A realistic pre-election poll might have taken into account how many millions of Americans witnessed unbecoming behavior by individuals who thought they were going to have the upper hand come Election Day.)

By the weekend before the election, I for one was wondering about the much-touted ‘landslide’. I was not very surprised at the outcome but was disappointed that Russ Feingold lost the Wisconsin senate race. Knowing the Clintons, Feingold’s appeal is probably one of the reasons they neglected Wisconsin. Much of their joint public career for forty years has consisted of playing keep-away, and much of their appeal has been to media insiders who play keep-away themselves. (A realistic post-election investigation might try to examine how the Clintons went about rewarding or enticing favorable media coverage.) No wonder they were so surprised: they shut out the very people they should have been listening to.

These issues connected to the Clintons and to the Democratic Party establishment extend to the news media which confidently predicted a big-time Clinton victory. For now, space and time constraints preclude my going into the media issues. Suffice it to say that we are now hearing self-serving commentators mutually affirming their moral superiority to the unwashed masses. Largely these are the people who went along with Bush’s invasion of Iraq. As with sexual assault, it saddens me to see Iraq swept under the rug. On top of the loss of blood and treasure, in all that (temporary) emphasis on sexual assault during the campaign, no one mentioned that rape follows war.

One last point: owing to the experience I suffered, I felt pummeled throughout the 2016 election cycle–beginning with the smug, complacent assertions of Clinton’s being the inevitable nominee, in 2015 and before. The reaction is difficult to write about, even now. Several media theories about election 2016 have addressed the wrongness of the opinion polls–silent Trump voters, distrust of pollsters, faulty polling methods. I have another theory to add: that I am not the only one in my position. Few Americans would have wanted to share an intensely private perspective on Bill Clinton with pollsters. Even fewer would have wanted to volunteer their private opinion–for example, believing Juanita Broaddrick–with pollsters, without being asked to do so.

And no pollsters asked.

*This was a childhood incident. I was in elementary school at the time, an undersized fifth-grader walking alone through a big park in Houston, to a Brownies meeting. The perpetrator was not someone I knew, and the police never caught him. But at least there was none of that nonsense about not believing me. Everyone knew I could not have made it up, and anyway I was taken to the ER of the local charity hospital–Ben Taub–for an exam.

 

 

A “vanilla characterization”: Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, and Hillary Clinton

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Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Hillary Clinton. Your cash is good at the bar.

Emails recently released via wikileaks restore little hope about the Clinton team behind scenes. The excerpts below, verbatim and in-house, pertain to that vexed topic of Clinton’s paid speeches for Wall Street.

They’re pretty clear. Little editorializing required. As Halloween approaches, some naked self-exposure of cynical willingness to fool the public is highlighted in orange:

On Fri, Nov 20, 2015 at 3:03 PM, Dan Schwerin <dschwerin@hillaryclinton.com> wrote: > Following up on the conversation this morning about needing more arrows in > our quiver on Wall Street, I wanted to float one idea. In October 2014, > HRC did a paid speech in NYC for Deutsche Bank. I wrote her a long riff > about economic fairness and how the financial industry has lost its way, > precisely for the purpose of having something we could show people if ever > asked what she was saying behind closed doors for two years to all those > fat cats. It’s definitely not as tough or pointed as we would write it > now, but it’s much more than most people would assume she was saying in > paid speeches. (Full transcript is attached and key riff is pasted below.) > Perhaps at some point there will be value in sharing this with a reporter > and getting a story written. Upside would be that when people say she’s too > close to Wall Street and has taken too much money from bankers, we can > point to evidence that she wasn’t afraid to speak truth to power. Downside > would be that we could then be pushed to release transcripts from all her > paid speeches, which would be less helpful (although probably not > disastrous). In the end, I’m not sure this is worth doing, but wanted to > flag it so you know it’s out there.

The suggestion did not meet with unmitigated moral contempt or a generous wrath. On the following Monday, Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon passed it along:

Reviving this thread because AP is working on a story similar to Pat Healy’s article in Sunday’s NYT about HRC’s “Wall Street image problem.” The reporter, Lisa Lerer, plans specifically to note that her paid speeches to banks were closed-press affairs, and transcripts are not available. She is asking if we wish to characterize her remarks in any way. I think we could come up with a vanilla characterization that challenges the idea that she sucked up to these folks in her appearances, but then use AP’s raising of this to our advantage to pitch someone to do an exclusive by providing at least the key excerpts from this Deutsche Bank speech. In doing so, we could have the reporting be sourced to a “transcript obtained by [news outlet]” so it is not confirmed as us selectively providing one transcript while refusing to share others.

There were demurrals. As Mandy Grunwald responded the same day,

I worry about going down this road. First, the remarks below make it sound like HRC DOESNT think the game is rigged — only that she recognizes that the public thinks so. They are angry. She isn’t. Second, once you start looking at speeches, you run smack into Maggie Haberman’s report for Politico on HRC’s Goldman Sachs speech, in which HRC isn’t quoted directly, but described as saying people shouldn’t be vilifying Wall Street.

In other words, the suggested riff might not obfuscate enough to be helpful. As Grunwald went on,

Maybe you think the Deutsche Bank speech takes the sting out of the Goldman report — but I am concerned that the passage below will exacerbate not improve the situation.

For nostalgic reasons, I like seeing the name Deutsche Bank come up. Remember the great moment in Casablanca when Rick (Humphrey Bogart) entertains an official from Deutsche Bank?

Clip on Youtube here

Playing it again

Playing it again

The dialogue names names:

53. I’m sorry sir, this is a private room.

 

54. Of all the nerve! Who do you think…? I know there’s gambling in there ! There’s no secret . You dare not keep me out of here! You

 

55. Yes? What’s the trouble? ABDUL This gentleman — GERMAN RICK Your cash is good at the bar. GERMAN What ! Do you know who I am? Yes? What’s the trouble? This gentleman ….

 

56. I’ve been in every gambling room between Honolulu and Berlin and if you think I’m going to be kept out of a saloon like this, you’re very much mistaken.

 

57. Hello Ugarte. Uh, excuse me, please. Hello, Rick.

 

58. What! Do you know who I am? Your cash is good at the bar

 

59. I do . You’re lucky the bar is open to you.

 

60. This is outrageous. I shall report it to the Angriff!

 

61. Huh. You know, Rick, watching you just now with the Deutsche Bank, one would think you’d been doing this all your life.

 

62. Well, what makes you think I haven’t.

Pneumonia and Dishonesty

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As has now been disclosed, Secretary Clinton was diagnosed with pneumonia on Friday, September 9, according to the statement by her physician, Dr. Lisa Bardack. Her campaign revealed the diagnosis on Sunday, September 11–five hours after a videotape aired her condition.

Clinton is helped into van

Setting aside duplicity, spin and careerism, from the perspective of the body politic there are several genuine concerns.

First, for the record–I am still a human being with a heart, and I wish her a speedy and full recovery, as I would anyone. Notwithstanding the poisonous rhetoric around both Clinton and Trump, I wish them good health. To do otherwise would be fascistic.

Also for the record, ‘anyone’ includes prison inmates. Do you wonder how the for-profit private prisons now infesting the United States are treating their prisoners who come down with pneumonia? Linked here is one answer. Here is another.

1. One central concern is Clinton’s untruthfulness. The health of a U.S. chief executive is a legitimate topic for public discourse. Clinton had a coughing fit on camera on September 5 (Labor Day), and made a junior-high joke about being allergic to Trump. According to her physician’s statement, she had a “follow up evaluation of her prolonged cough” on September 9 and was then diagnosed with pneumonia. Pneumonia is a serious illness (see below), regrettably too common in the U.S.
Following the coughing spell in Cleveland, Ohio, Clinton dismissed health questions as “conspiracy theories.” Coincidentally, the trip to Cleveland was the first aboard her new campaign plane, on which–as numerous news outlets have reported–Clinton has also recently begun having in-flight conversations with reporters. During the chats, she made light of her cough, attributing it to “seasonal allergies” and telling reporters that she was taking antihistamines.
Following the September 9 diagnosis, instead of just disclosing through staff that she had pneumonia and would be scaling back campaign activities ‘for a few days’, or some such statement, Clinton appeared in several public events without mentioning the diagnosis. She left the September 11 memorial so abruptly that the press was not aware of her departure. The campaign kept the development from the press for some ninety minutes. Her spokesman then exaggerated the time she had spent at the ceremony. The campaign attributed her leaving early to her being “overheated” as well as “dehydrated,” while temperatures in New York City on that partly cloudy morning hovered in the 80s. Only after the video surfaced did the Clinton campaign disclose the September 9 diagnosis, without specifics as to whether she had had a chest X-ray or how long she had had the pneumonia. Only after the disclosure of the diagnosis have further reports surfaced that several people in Clinton’s New York office had pneumonia last month, some of whom ended up in the emergency room.
Last night (9/12), CNN’s Anderson Cooper interviewed Secretary Clinton, who phoned in. To polite but probing questions as to why she continued campaigning with pneumonia, Clinton answered that she was determined to be at the 9-11 ceremony. She said again how hot and “muggy” it was in New York. She also said, twice, that her publicly released medical records are equivalent to those released by Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. Asked why she didn’t just reveal the pneumonia, she said with a warm chuckle that “I just didn’t think it was going to be that big a deal.” This cringe-worthy claim is already much quoted–and is typical of the way Clinton herself keeps giving rise to speculations of must-be-the-blood-thinner. Not only did cable commentators dismiss the assertion (immediately), it is contradicted by reports that Clinton hid the pneumonia from most of her own team.
Following the news uproar, both Clinton and Trump have said that they will release fuller medical records. When Cooper asked Clinton last night whether “details about your medical history” would be released, however, Clinton did not answer the question directly. She also ducked mention of her health problems in 2012. Adding to the other irritants, Clinton brought up her 2012 health problems in responding to FBI inquiries, to explain some lack of recollection and her use of the private email server while she was working from home.
Side note: the best article on Secretary Clinton’s health problems that I have seen so far is this by Todd Frankel.

Condensing three further items, saving two more

–Looking at the length of concern #1, above, I’m realizing that other concerns have to be edited for length. So, shortening the following–

2. That Clinton has media figures openly shilling for her is an ongoing concern. When a legitimate issue flares up on the campaign trail, it gets worse. This item is painful, and I’m going to keep it short. Google “Clinton” “health” “conspiracy,” and millions of results include articles that–at best–dismiss any mention of Secretary Clinton’s health as ‘conspiracy theory’. NBC and MSNBC in particular are ludicrous. NBC has tried gamely to smooth things over for Clinton. Rachel Maddow and Chris Matthews have ‘conspiracy theory’ on the brain. Maddow has not hesitated to ‘debunk’ every mention of Clinton’s health as a tinfoil-hat production.
Some of the spin continues even now that the pneumonia has been disclosed. The newest line is that pneumonia is ‘not serious’. I myself am startled by that one (see #4, below). Naturally, Clinton surrogates would try this one, but it is also being pushed by some commentators and a few reporters.
Another line is that Clinton has “walking pneumonia”–which is not actually pneumonia, nor is it a medical diagnosis or a medical term. No, she doesn’t. She has real pneumonia.
Then there’s the Clinton “stumble.” The video clip shows Secretary Clinton unable to stand or walk on her own. She leans on a post and on the arm of an aide. Then she is lifted into the van as she sinks, her feet dragging. This is not a “stumble.”
“Penchant for privacy”? More accurately, Secretary Clinton seems to feel that she must always have things other people never have. The president of the United States gave up his Blackberry. But Secretary Clinton had her own private communications technology installed in-home. (I do not recall whether State was billed for it, or if so, how much.) Other candidates have taken time off during campaigns, for health reasons, and have said so openly. But she seems to feel uniquely entitled to keep her health issues off the grid, even if it means dissembling. This is not a “penchant for privacy.” It is a penchant for tasteless entitlement. (Sorry, but no, I don’t understand it. Neither does anyone else who grew up on Jane Eyre and Jane Austen, Louisa May Alcott and Mark Twain, Shakespeare and Dickens.)

3. Her aides, or her team, do not serve her to handle issues appropriately. Yes, I know; it is unlikely that she allows them to speak frankly. But it is still a concern that Clinton aides won’t, or can’t, tell her the right thing to do. They wouldn’t, or couldn’t, persuade her that openness about the pneumonia diagnosis would be best. Maybe they didn’t realize it themselves; maybe they knew better but couldn’t speak; either way, they are presumably her own personnel choices. This concern is not just a matter of campaign gamesmanship (although if you compare Clinton’s campaign to Barack Obama’s in either 2008 or 2012, you have to cringe a little). The graver issue is that if she has an entourage of this sort when she’s just a candidate, if her people are this way when she is a mere candidate, what chance is there that as president she would appoint people who would counsel her or guide her adequately?

4. Health is a genuine concern. Regardless of political attacks and political defenses, the real concern is the candidate’s actual health. Setting aside the pneumonia for the moment, Secretary Clinton has had a serious concussion that by her own admission gave her double vision and (talking to the FBI) caused some loss of memory. According to her husband in the past couple of days, she has a history of dizzy spells and dehydration. Then there is the blood thinner–a drastically strong medication, and I have seen its effects on people near me.
This is not to imply that everyone on blood thinners is mentally impaired. An old friend of mine takes a blood thinner, with no loss of mental acuity whatever. But then she works out strenuously with a trainer; she watches her food intake–not ‘dieting’, but sidestepping alcohol and sweets in favor of vegetables and proteins; and she paces herself at work, in a high-powered and cerebral job with much responsibility. Does any of this sound like Secretary Clinton? Clinton’s campaign lifestyle is like a World War II-era pamphlet on what not to do–fast pace, grueling schedule, too little exercise and too much food, and rich on-the-road food at that. Anyone who has to travel a lot, or anyone who has to take several trips back-to-back, knows the pull of out-of-town food and scheduling.
Without saying that Secretary Clinton’s ill health is dire, pneumonia is still ill health. Arguing otherwise is ludicrous, and a disservice to the public. I had pneumonia myself, last winter, combined with bronchitis, as I have written elsewhere. I knew about the bronchitis (four severe bouts), did not know about the pneumonia, finally got a chest X-ray on the fourth trip to the clinic–got the diagnosis of “lung infection”–and landed in the hospital. Meanwhile, of course, I had been going to work. Full recovery took me a few months.
So far as I know, I did not infect anyone. However, I caught my bronchitis and pneumonia from a nice guy I ride a shuttle bus with–finding this out when he casually mentioned that he had come down with both, too, a few weeks before I did.
Apparently other people are as unacquainted with pneumonia as I was. A UK periodical just ran a piece posing the questions ‘What is pneumonia?’ and ‘What are the symptoms?’ Answer: pneumonia is a lung infection. Symptoms include coughing, physical weakness, tiredness, and death (as one of my doctors pointed out). The risk of pneumonia is one reason why elderly patients are in danger if they stay in the hospital too long. (In medical argot, these are “Complications after surgery” — cf. “contractions in childbirth,” or don’t-get-me-started.)

A few commentators have already proposed that presidential candidates should be compelled by rule to disclose their medical records. I concur. And the rule should be that declared candidates have to provide their medical records before nomination.

Hillary Clinton about 2008: “Eventually I just decided I had to withdraw”

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Sunday, May 1 (May Day):

CNN’s State of the Union with Jake Tapper, Tapper interviewing Secretary Clinton, established two points. First, in spite of polls showing widespread doubt about Clinton’s honesty, Clinton still tends to make recklessly inaccurate statements in public venues. Second, Clinton and strategist Karen Finney suggested no particular place for Senator Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic national convention. They offered no specific suggestions as to how Sanders delegates might contribute.

To the first point, this pick-up line from Clinton:

“There comes a time when you have to look at the [realities],” Clinton said. “In fact, in ’08 I was much closer in both popular vote and pledged delegates to Sen. Obama than is the case right now, but eventually I just decided that I had to withdraw and support Sen. Obama because the goal was to make sure we had a Democrat in the White House.”

The statement is posted at CNN.com. Clinton actually said that in 2008, she “eventually just decided I had to withdraw.” Link here. The interview was taped Friday (April 29).

Tapper had asked Clinton whether she was the presumptive nominee, as Trump styles himself. She demurred but said appropriately that she is on the path to the nomination.

But leaving behind the appropriate and dignified, again to the fore comes Clinton’s compulsion to overreach. It wasn’t enough for her just to tell Tapper that she was ahead, and that she hoped for party unity. Asked about the 2008 campaign, she had to rewrite history. In actual fact, Clinton did not ‘withdraw’ from the 2008 Democratic primary until June. In fact, she did not withdraw; she lost. The comments below from National Public Radio on June 5, 2008, are representative:

“From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I’m Robert Siegel.

This Saturday, Hillary Clinton will concede – maybe. She’s expected to congratulate Barack Obama on winning the Democratic nomination. But there have been mixed messages from Clinton’s campaign and she is not planning to release her delegates.

NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson reports.

MARA LIASSON: Senator Clinton’s behavior since Obama clinched the nomination has some of her strongest supporters worried that she is undermining Obama at a historic moment that should be his to savor. Congressman Charlie Rangel is the dean of Clinton’s own state delegation in the House.

Representative CHARLES RANGEL (Democrat, New York): The New York congressional delegation are with her to the end, but we thought the end was the end.

LIASSON: The end Rangel meant was Tuesday night [June 3, 2008], when Clinton delivered what many Democrats are calling her less-than-gracious non-concession speech. To give you an idea how much anguish this has caused even her most loyal supporters, listen to Bill Galston, a former top aide in Bill Clinton’s White House.

Mr. BILL GALSTON: I was an early supporter and remain supportive of her candidacy as long – as long as there – the candidacy was at stake. Having said that – how to put this? This is really hard for me. She’s not doing either herself or Senator Obama any favors.”

The issue in 2008 went beyond a less-than-gracious concession speech. As previously written, one Clinton campaign tactics in 2008 was to keep referencing the 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy as proof that anything can happen in an election.

It can hardly be expected that Clinton would bring up that issue in a Sunday morning interview. Still, she could have refrained from egregious distortion.

Other parts of Clinton’s statement above may be more colorable but also are problematic. The timeline of the 2008 election shows that on May 1, 2008, Sen. Clinton did indeed have more delegates than Bernie Sanders has now. However, she also had to lend her campaign $1 million of her own money. (On April 29, she had come on ABC saber-rattling against Iran.) A few days later (May 5) she lent her campaign another $425K.

The first week of May was big in 2008. On May 5, Clinton’s campaign argued that the total needed to win nomination should be 200 additional delegates, an attempt to move the goalposts. On May 7, Clinton reminded audiences about the killing of RFK in 1968 once in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, and once in Washington, D.C. (There is no evidence that the times recorded are the only occasions Clinton used this talking point. It was and is a delicate item for reporters.) On May 8, she told USA Today that “Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans is weakening.” She later walked back the comment. She is now walking back her “off the reservation” comment about Trump or others, used as the tease by CNN this morning.

Less colorful but also problematic

Other statements Clinton and her strategist Karen Finney, in today’s CNN round table, could raise concern. Clinton said early, in response to questions about working with Sanders, that she looks forward to working with Sanders “in the lead-up to the convention” and “in the lead-up to the platform.” If this phrasing was more carefully chosen than some of her other comments, it does not suggest much place for Senator Sanders and his delegates in Philadelphia.

In the CNN round table, Sanders strategist Jeff Weaver reiterated that Sanders will stay in the race until the Democratic convention. Finney’s comments paralleled Clinton’s. While making nice to Sanders in general terms, Finney refrained from specifics. She referred to “conversations” with Sanders about “what he thinks is important for the platform.” Finney suggested that Clinton agrees with Sanders broadly on his positions, or some positions, but has different approaches as to “how we get there.”

None of this raises hope that Sanders supporters will be part of the national conversation, from the perspective of the Clinton campaign in 2016.

Clinton on convention platform

Back to the “I just decided I had to withdraw” line —

Clinton’s insistence on rewriting history is the more baffling for being so unnecessary. Virtually any candidate could have put the same thing better. A witty, self-deprecating Barack Obama or Jack Kennedy might have made a joke out of it. “Eventually, after going down [xxx] delegates after that last primary, I just decided to withdraw. Primaries aren’t everything.”

Something along those lines. But for Hillary Clinton, the way to sum up the 2008 primary–which she lost decisively–is with an insinuation that she withdrew voluntarily. There was no follow-up question about ’08.

Yet the Clinton allies fret about media coverage, and about that persistent perception of untruthfulness.

[Edited slightly from morning post]

 

 

 

Hillary Clinton on using other people’s words (2008)

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There is a great Saturday Night Live parody of Hillary Clinton literally turning into Bernie Sanders:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cs47ce4QRBY

(Video clips of the hilarious skit are widely available on the Internet, here and here among other places.)

Now let’s get back to that topic of amnesia about 2008.

On Thursday, February 21, in the 2008 campaign, Senator Hillary Clinton leveled a singular accusation against Senator Barack Obama.

From transcripts:

“SEN. CLINTON: Well, I think that if your candidacy is going to be about words, then they should be your own words. That’s, I think, a very simple proposition. (Applause.) And you know — you know, lifting whole passages from someone else’s speeches is not change you can believe in; it’s change you can Xerox. And I just don’t think —

SEN. OBAMA: Oh, but that — that’s not what happened there —

SEN. CLINTON: No, but — you know, but Barack, it is, because if — you know, if you look — (jeers from the audience) — if you look — if you look — if you look at the YouTube of these videos, it does raise questions.”

The exchange attracted some attention on the campaign trail, although with less than success than the Clinton campaign presumably hoped. As discussed by anchor Lloyd Robertson on CTV Television the same night,

LLOYD ROBERTSON: And the two Democratic contenders for the U.S. Presidential nomination struck a few sparks tonight during a debate in the crucial state of Texas. At one point the moderator asked Senator Barack Obama how he responded to charges from Senator Hillary Clinton’s campaign that he was guilty of plagiarizing a speech by the Governor of Massachusetts. Obama pointed out that the governor, Demal Patrick, was a co chair of his campaign.

BARACK OBAMA  (Democratic Presidential Candidate): The notion that I had plagiarized from somebody who was one of my national co chairs, who gave me the line and suggested that I use it I think is silly.

Less pointed than the criticism itself is the remarkable fact that it came from Hillary Clinton, who is now going around trying to sound like Elizabeth Warren.

As I wrote in 2008, as a feminist I would like to vote for a woman for president. But the fundamental problems with Mrs. Clinton remain exactly the same now, as then, including her ability to say nice-sounding things, good things, and then to turn around and either do the opposite or use her language as a smokescreen for economic rapacity.

Quite simply, this is a candidate who has never marched in the vanguard for economic justice. She is still GOP Lite, the Republicans’ stop-loss candidate, as Mr. Koch’s recent comments confirm.

As fallible human beings, we all fall short of perfect truth. But Mrs. Clinton carries a pleasant, complacent deceitfulness into pathology territory, like a spouse in denial. She can sound so nice that, at least when she feels relatively comfortable, she resembles some of the moms you remember from the PTA, down to earth, reasonably sensible–and then she trots out a line about the other candidate that turns out to be either exactly the reverse of true, or far more applicable to herself.

Take for example her habit, or pattern, of accusing others of exactly her own problems, like the accusation that Obama was using someone else’s words, or the (dog-whistle) harping on Obama’s alleged inexperience. There was also her other jaw-dropping line on Barack Obama in 2008:

“Well, you know, Senator Obama, it is very difficult having a straight-up debate with you, because you never take responsibility for any vote, and that has been a pattern.”

As I wrote back then, I never did think this was a particularly good read on Obama, whose positions generally come across as measured and rational–well thought out, in other words.

The criticism applies better to the Clintons. Clinton’s vote for George Bush’s war is the perfect example. The public overwhelmingly recognizes that the Iraq resolution gave Bush the cover he needed to invade Iraq. But did Mrs. Clinton acknowledge that? No, her version of the story was that she voted for the war in order to rein in Bush.

As for Bill Clinton, he is rapidly becoming the epicenter of defensiveness. In this election cycle, he has spoken to audiences as though he thinks the Iraq War should not even be brought up. As I wrote in the 2008 election, Bill Clinton is now (again) lumbering around testy and blustering, bullying reporters and blaming the media for his wife’s problematic candidacy. The main difference is that President Clinton was red-faced in 2008 and is pale and thin now.

This is not a matter of appearances. It’s the conduct that is unbecoming. And yet the Clintons themselves seem to feel little doubt that Bill Clinton is adored wherever he goes. (The grain of truth in this representation is that, as in 2008, the Clintons fare better with audiences and voters in communities with less access to the Internet. In 2008, Hillary Clinton did better with seniors, as she does to some extent now, in some regions. In 2016, she often does better with African-Americans–especially in the Deep South states with the widest racial disparity in Internet access.)

Back to Mrs. Clinton’s own career. To recap: she was a good student in college and at Yale Law; flunked the bar exam; moved to Arkansas and re-took the bar exam there; passed. Married Bill Clinton, who became Arkansas’ attorney general and then governor for several terms, after an early loss.

Her law career in Arkansas? Her law career was as the governor’s wife. Look where she worked. For all Mrs. Clinton’s high-sounding rhetoric about ‘fighting for us’, ‘standing up to the NRA’, etc., did she take a low-paying public-service job in the Public Defender’s office? No. Did she go to work as an Assistant District Attorney, fighting crime? No. Welfare or Child Services? No. Did she work as a labor lawyer, helping organizers in Arkansas? Pursue corporate malefactors for workplace abuses or environmental abuses? Sexual harassment? Get real. This is no Norma Rae. Mrs. Clinton went for a ‘good’ job, a job she got as a pol’s wife,  in the most established law firm in Arkansas. (For perspective, check out statistics on the employment situation for most young adults with first-professional degrees in the late 1970s.)

Back to February, 2008 —

By the way, what Obama had said was,

“We are going to rid the tax code of these loopholes and giveaways. We’re going to stop giving a penny of your money to anybody who ships a job out of Texas, Ohio or anywhere else to another country. We’re certainly going to begin to get the tax code to reflect what the needs of middle class families are, so we can rebuild a strong and prosperous middle class.”

Surely every Obama voter, including this one, believes that we would be better off if these goals had been achieved. But they have been obstructed, to the last syllable, by Republicans in Congress and out. And they were never boosted successfully, or effectively, by the Clintons or by Hillary Clinton’s top allies. The globe-trotting Clintons have been considerably more engaged in reaping big bucks abroad than in keeping American jobs at home.

In hindsight, it looks as though Clinton’s accusation of plagiarizing was basically an indirect attack on Obama’s statement itself. She couldn’t outright come out and oppose keeping jobs at home or getting rid of corporate giveaways in the tax code. But she could signal indirectly, to interested donors, that she had her mind on other things.

Defeat amnesia: More on Hillary Clinton comments in 2008

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More on Hillary Clinton in 2008–

The previous blog (Friday, April 15) was a reminder of Senator Hillary Clinton’s 2008 comments on assassination. Specifically, she instanced as the reason for her staying in the 2008 race the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in June 1968. As a parallel to the effect of that tragic event on the 1968 race, she said that her husband had won his race in 1992 in June.

Below is some of the discussion–just some of it–stemming from Clinton’s repeated remark. The commentary quoted below, while trenchant,  is only the tip of the iceberg. Moreover, as I wrote previously, Clinton had actually made the same reference several times before on the campaign trail. It was her using the explicit word “assassination” in a conversation with a newspaper’s editorial board that had such impact in May, 2008.

There are a few concerns here. One is the series of shifting and implausible explanations Clinton gave for her remarks; see below. Another is her not apologizing to the other candidates–Senators Barack Obama and John McCain–who had a vested interest in the remarks. (She rushed to apologize to the Kennedys.) There is a strong concern about a presidential candidate’s referring to assassination in a heated race; see below. And last, there is the strong possibility that many newer voters this year have never been informed about the character Clinton displayed as candidate in 2008.

From transcripts

May 23, 2008: Fox News Network: FOX SPECIAL REPORT WITH BRIT HUME 6:00 p.m. EST:

“(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. HILLARY CLINTON, (D) NEW YORK: My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California.”

Clinton then apologized–to the Kennedy family–for her remarks:

“I was referencing those to make the point that we have had nominations, primary contests that go into June. That’s historic fact, and I regret that if my referencing that moment of trauma for our entire nation, and particularly for the Kennedy family, was in any way offensive. I certainly had no intention of that whatsoever.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

“BAIER: The first video there was Hillary Clinton talking to a South Dakota newspaper editorial board, where, as you heard, she mentioned the assassination in 1968.

The second video, an apology late this afternoon, scrambling before cameras, after the Barack Obama campaign put out this quote:

“Senator Clinton’s statement before the editorial board was unfortunate and has no place in this campaign,” Bill Burton, campaign spokesman.”

I am not always a fan of the political coverage on Fox. But this was one occasion when Fox News commentators got it right:

“KRAUTHAMMER: It was an amazing gaffe. She has spoken in the past about how about in ’68 and ’92 the campaigns have gone on long into June, but she had never uttered the word “assassination.” And the reason is that you don’t in presidential campaigns.

We all worry about it, and we worry about it in particular when you have the first African-American candidate who can be the president.

And that’s not a paranoid fascinating. You remember that Colin Powell was on a wave of support in 1996, and thinking of running. According to Bob Woodward, his wife Alma had said that he could not run, and, in fact, Woodward writes that she had said she would leave him if he ran for one reason–she thought he would be assassinated.

We have a history of that in our country. It was obviously on the Powells’ mind, and it is in the back of people’s minds today. And you worry about it. Whenever you see a presidential candidate wade into a crowd, everybody worries about it.

But for her to say the word is astonishing. I have to attribute it to fatigue, exhaustion, because raising it in this context is really toxic. She had to come out and apologize immediately. But I think it resonates.

BAIER: There are people out there, obviously, Nina, who will say she has said this line a million times. Today she used the assassination. Why?”

Note the point made by Bret Baier in passing–that Clinton had made the same reference often before. (This time, she made it unavoidably explicit.) The suggestion is borne out in further commentary:

“NINA EASTON, WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF, “FORTUNE MAGAZINE”: There are some people who are speculating that she did this purposely, which is, I think, insane, because it was so politically stupid, why would she do that?

I think probably what it was was a bit of a curtain raiser for us on her private conversations, as in things could happen. This is why she’ll stay in this race and why her husband Bill is encouraging her to stay in the race, because things could happen.

But I agree with Charles, the idea of mentioning the word “assassination.” We know that Barack Obama has been subject to threats. He has been under secret service protection for more than a year now because of that.

It’s a troubling kind of link to make, and it probably doesn’t help her standing with the Obama campaign.”

On May 23, 2008, from a different place on the political spectrum, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann hosted similar perspectives:

“KEITH OLBERMANN, HOST (voice over): Which of these stories will you be talking about tomorrow?

At Sioux Falls, South Dakota, for the first time, Senator Hillary Clinton actually invokes the assassination of Bobby Kennedy in 1968 as a reason for her not to drop out of the race with Senator Obama.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. HILLARY CLINTON,  (D-NY) PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right?

We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

OLBERMANN: Why in the name of all that all of us hold dear, would anybody ever say anything like this? Can she in good conscious continue in the race for president after having said anything like this? Is her political career at an end?

An official statement from Senator Clinton`s campaign: “She was simply referencing her husband in 1992 and Bobby Kennedy in 1968 as historic examples of the nominating contest going well into the summer. Any, any reading into it beyond that is inaccurate.”

Howard Fineman on the extraordinary statement and its ramifications for Senator Clinton and her presidential bid. Jonathan Alter on why — even if it were appropriate – she would say it, since it`s not like the sudden retirement or incapacity of a candidate, would mean the Democrats would simply not run anybody.

And a Special Comment: This time Senator Clinton, you have gone too far.”

Olbermann makes a good point on the lack of internal logic in Clinton’s comment: hypothetically anything could happen, but the hypothetical event would not necessarily change everything. The historical event in 2008 was that no presidential candidate before had done what Clinton did.

“OLBERMANN: Obviously, the operative word here is assassination. She used it at least once before, as a historical marker to time two months ago, but all the references since to, even timing — to even Robert Kennedy`s death had avoided that word. That word is a third rail word in American politics, is it not?

FINEMAN: It sure is. And it shocked her today and shocked the world of the campaign. I`ve been on the phone and blackberrying (ph) with leaders on both camps and elsewhere. And you saw Hillary Clinton in that supermarket there looking kind of dazed herself. I think she realized that she had done something here that`s going to be very hard to repair.

Even though David Axelrod, the leader of the Obama campaign told me in similar words, he said, “Look, I assume she didn`t mean anything here. You know, it`s too dark a thought to think otherwise.”

As pointed out in Friday’s post, Clinton’s examples (1968 and 1992) were not good examples in the first place. If Hillary Clinton was going to defend long primary seasons, she had better examples:

“She could have cited 1984 or 1988, Mike Dukakis, she could have even talk about Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford battling it out to the floor of the convention in Kansas City in 1976. And she`s got something on her mind there that, I think, has troubled a lot of people somehow.”

Olbermann was among commentators (and others) who noticed that Clinton addressed her apology of sorts to the Kennedys, not to Obama or to the public:

“OLBERMANN: She also apologized for it when she did, an apology might be too strong a term. She expressed her regrets, specifically to the Kennedy family, but not to Senator Obama,  not to Senator McCain, who was another candidate in this race while this term is out there. Does that not seem to have left even the regret`s part of the job sort of half done?

FINEMAN: Well, it was a double pass there, Keith. She not only didn`t actually apologize to the Kennedy family, she said, “If somebody is upset about it, then I`m sorry.” And, of course, she completely avoided the main subject here, which is the notion that she somehow even inadvertently or somehow subconsciously in some weird way, was bringing up the possibility that there might be some cataclysmic change – you know, event in the campaign here like that.

So, she didn`t – she seems constitutionally incapable of just saying — I screwed up. And her sort of lead footedness about this here is being observed by all the people who are still undecided about whom to back.”

Clinton in 2008

Again, aside from the graver issues, there is that off-the-mark choice of 1968 and 1992 in the first place. The horse race was different then:

“OLBERMANN: Yes. Howard made a great point. The other practical political issue in this, the invoking of the assassination of RFK in June as a landmark, as a fixed time in the process, or even her husband clinching in June of 1992 — it`s apples and oranges historically, isn`t it? Because in `92, the Iowa caucuses were on the 10th of February; in 1968, New Hampshire was March 12th. June then is not June now.

ALTER: Right. The other thing that`s really important to understand is the first part of her answer where she referred to her husband, that somehow, like he didn`t clinch the nomination until June of 1992 is preposterous. He had had the nomination wrapped up for weeks by that point. Now, because California didn`t vote until June, as a technical matter, he wasn`t over the top, but the race was long since over.”

RFK in 1968

Olbermann’s special comment was forceful. Here, in part:

“She actually said those words.

Those words, Senator?

You actually invoked the nightmare of political assassination?

You actually invoked the specter of an inspirational leader, at the seeming moment of triumph for himself and a battered nation yearning to breathe free, silenced forever?

You actually used the word “assassination” in the middle of a campaign with a loud undertone of racial hatred — and gender hatred — and political hatred?

You actually used the word “assassination” in a time when there is a fear, unspoken but vivid and terrible, that our again-troubled land and fractured political landscape might target a black man running for president?

Or a white man.

Or a white woman!

You actually used those words, in this America, Senator, while running against an African-American man against whom the death threats started the moment he declared his campaign?

You actually used those words, in this America, Senator, while running to break your “greatest glass ceiling” and claiming there are people who would do anything to stop you?”

Moving back rightward on the spectrum, on May 25, 2008, Fox News’ Chris Wallace addressed Clinton’s comments. Wallace interviewed Terry McAuliffe, chair of the Clinton campaign, who of course denied that there was anything dark in Clinton’s line of thought. Here in part:

“MR. WALLACE: I want to ask you a couple of questions, then I’m going to get off this.

When Governor Huckabee made a bad joke at the NRA about someone pointing a gun at Obama, he immediately apologized and he personally called Obama to say he was sorry. Has Senator Clinton personally called Obama?

MCAULIFFE: No, and nor should she. Let’s be very clear. I will say this again.

This has nothing to do with Senator Obama. This was all about Hillary Clinton, her campaign, Chris, and her timeline.

WALLACE: But given the fact that people have been so offended, wouldn’t it make sense for her simply to call and say, hey, listen, if this caused you any heartburn, I’m sorry?

MCAULIFFE: Chris, I don’t why you’re saying everyone’s offended. The press corps, it’s a quiet weekend, everybody got overhyped, they had a big weekend talking about it.

But you know what I’ve got to tell you? Chris, out in Puerto Rico and South Dakota where I just was last week, and Montana, this is not what they’re talking about. They’re talking about $4-a-gallon gas. They’re not going away for Memorial Day weekend. They’re talking about having —

WALLACE: I’ll tell you somebody who was offended. Charlie Rangel — one of your big supporters, one of the people who helped get Hillary Clinton into politics running for the Senate from New York — said it was one of the dumbest remarks he’d ever heard. So there are a lot of people who were offended.”

Wallace, often well prepared for interviews, can actually produce follow-up questions. In this case, he pointed to an obvious inconsistency in Clinton’s saying that she mentioned Robert Kennedy because she was thinking of Ted Kennedy (whose brain cancer had just been announced). Chronology is key:

“MR. WALLACE: Last question. Senator Clinton explained her reference to the Kennedy assassination by saying that the family is on her mind because of Ted Kennedy’s recent illness.

But as you point out, more than two months ago, here’s what she told Time Magazine: Primary contests used to last a lot longer. We all remember the great tragedy of Bobby Kennedy being assassinated in June in L.A.

So it’s not true that she started thinking about this and it was on her mind because of Ted Kennedy’s illness.”

McAuliffe gamely, if less than coherently, did his best to shore up Clinton’s explanation:

“MCAULIFFE: Maybe, obviously, in this context. She has had thousands of interviews since she talked in March to Time Magazine. Thousands and thousands. Maybe on this one editorial board she was [back ?] because she was thinking about Senator Kennedy and the brain cancer and all of that issue.”

On May 27, 2008, MSNBC’s Hardball, addressed the topic.

“Let`s take a look right now at what Senator Clinton said.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. HILLARY CLINTON (D-NY), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. You know, I just — I don`t understand it.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MATTHEWS: You know, Senator Clinton has said in her defense, which is quite right, to make a defense in this case, she said that her comments were taken out of context. I would suggest that she didn`t say them in context. They came out to the public in the context of the following, unintended or not — the Ted Kennedy health problem right now, which everybody cares about, the fact that everyone cares about the safety of Barack Obama and worries about it, the fact that some of us fell a sort of deja vu about 1968 all the time, just in general, atmospheric times (ph), not about an assassination, the sense that Barack Obama is staying in the race for some outside event — not Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton — for some outside event, obviously not this tragedy, but something like another Jeremiah Wright story. There`s a lot of context. And then the horrendous joke by Huckabee last week where he talked about — week before last — where he talked about a noise at an NRA convention, he thinking — let`s say, comically, that it must have been Barack Obama falling off his chair because he saw somebody with a gun, as if that could ever be funny.

After quoting Clinton’s explanation and apology to the Kennedy family, Matthews continued,

“Roger, Jim Clyburn jumped on this. Of course, he said it was beyond the pale. His office put out that statement. The AP story went out that night, the Associated Press, Senator Hillary Clinton referred Friday to the assassination of Robert Kennedy in 1968 — in the 1968 campaign as a reason she should continue to campaign despite increasingly long odds.”

It wasn`t the Barack Obama campaign that went after her, it was the people trying to figure out what she was talking about.”

Regardless of political affiliation, on-air discussion of the Clinton comments mainly stayed appropriate and thoughtful. On Hardball:

“ROGER SIMON, POLITICO.COM: The first rule about talking about political assassination is you never talk about political assassination. I mean, I accept her at her word that she didn`t mean to say any of this, but you just don`t go there. We all have lived in times when a president, or most of us, has been assassinated, when a senator has been assassinated, Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated. There were what, two attempts on the lifes of — on the life of Gerald Ford. It was no — and it was widely reported that Colin Powell did not run for the presidency because his wife was so worried about his physical safety.

We all know why Barack Obama has Secret Service and the other candidates don`t. Hillary Clinton has it because she`s a first lady, former first lady. You don`t go there. Especially if you`re searching for a reason to stay in the race, you don`t want anyone to think it`s because you think something terrible will happen to your chief opponent.

MATTHEWS: Chrystia Freeland, your sense of this story. Does it have a scar (ph) factor here?

CHRYSTIA FREELAND, “FINANCIAL TIMES”: Yes, I think it does. I mean, I think that Roger is right that Hillary Clinton certainly misspoke. But in misspeaking, she broke an unwritten and really important political rule. I think the reason it had so much resonance is it`s really logical to believe that a big reason why Hillary Clinton is staying in the race is she is waiting for some unknown event to befall Barack Obama,  surely not a tragic one, more like a Reverend Wright turbocharged type event.

But I think that`s. . .

MATTHEWS: Yes.”

If it might be argued that the Hillary Clinton of 2016 differs from that of 2008, it is far more apparent that the Chris Matthews of 2016 is different from the Matthews of 2008. Would that we had that earlier Matthews back. He’s starting to look better, in hindsight.

Referencing the horse race

Clinton’s using 1968 as example was the more problematic in being factually wrong on its own terms. The Democratic primary race in 1968 did not go on for very long:

“MATTHEWS: I`d like to go back to the real veracity of what she said because she said that her campaign`s running into June. And I`m often reminded of being on the boardwalk in Cape May one time, watching a Stanley Cup playoff in the summertime, because sometimes, these things do go too long, including sports playoffs.

But the only reason I would have the problem with it right up front is the fact of it. Bobby Kennedy didn`t begin his campaign in 1968 — I`m reading this wonderful book (INAUDIBLE) plug this book, “The Last Campaign” by Thurston Clark [ph]. It`s a heck of a book. You know, it`s a really good book. But it points out again it was a very short campaign. It began in March of `68. And of course, he was assassinated in June.

Bill Clinton`s race was over by March of `92.

CHUCK TODD, NBC POLITICAL DIRECTOR: Right.

MATTHEWS: Why is she claiming these as examples or precedents for staying all the way through June, if she needs them? Why does she need a precedent?

TODD: I don`t know . . .

MATTHEWS: Nobody`s telling her to leave the race. Next week is the end of the primaries. What`s the rush?”

Matthews is basically right: there was no onslaught of advice to Clinton to drop out of the race anyway. She had no need to harp on “June.” Commentator Chuck Todd also noted the oddity of the choice:

“TODD: Well, she`s using the wrong — I mean, if she would use `84, `76 with Reagan…

MATTHEWS: Yes.

TODD: … or `84 with Gary Hart and Mondale, those would be much more factually correct, where the June primaries actually meant something. But I actually think what we`re seeing here is she made a mistake. You know, this idea that somehow she`s staying in the race because something could happen as far as Senator Obama,  when it comes to maybe a scandal or something like that . . .”

June 1976. June 1984. Not June 1968. I remember the 2008 election; you didn’t have to be a Republican to wonder whether Clinton’s wish was father to her thought. The suggestion was logically inescapable.

And as said, it was all over the air waves–this in a year when the major media outlets were overwhelmingly predisposed to treat Clinton as the favorite, from day one.

Last up, on May 27, 2008, NPR’s All Things Considered:

“DANIEL SCHORR:

The holiday weekend has afforded time to reflect on Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s apparent inability to understand why so many Americans are upset by her mention of the assassination of Robert Kennedy. Senator Clinton has shown evidence of a tin ear before, but her allusions to a past assassination for whatever reason displayed a deeper disconnect with an American trauma. Her assertion that her husband did not sew up the nomination in 1992 until mid-June, that’s factually wrong. Governor Bill Clinton was generally recognized as the Democratic front-runner from the time that Paul Tsongas withdrew in March, and he said so in his own memoir.

But more troubling was Senator Clinton’s reference to the assassination of Senator Kennedy 40 years ago on June 5th. These are thoughts better not articulated lest they have an effect on some disordered mind. From Lincoln to the Kennedys, we know the unhappy possibilities. We live with the sorrowful awareness that a talented soldier statesman, Colin Powell, agonized about running for president and finally decided against it when his wife, in tears, implored him not to expose himself as a target on the campaign trail. We live with memories that resulted in Senator Obama’s receiving Secret Service protection earlier than any other presidential candidate in history.

In a Washington Post-ABC poll last March, almost six of 10 Americans worried that someone might try to harm Senator Obama. Among African-Americans, the figure was eight of 10. We do not need to be reminded that one of our leaders can suddenly be struck down. Senator Clinton may have thought she was just helping her waning candidacy, but I imagine that she’s reduced her chances of being designated for vice president, only a heartbeat away from the presidency.

This is Daniel Schorr.”

Schorr’s grave and thoughtful commentary underscores the grim resonances of a slip like Clinton’s, in such a context.

Hillary Clinton not only repeatedly used the 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy as a talking point on the viability of her campaign in 2008. She basically imagined or created the context. Contrary to what Clinton was saying about her husband’s 1992 race, Bill Clinton had wrapped up the race in March, not “June.”

 

 

Hillary Clinton in campaign 2008: Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination as talking point

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From transcripts

Any candidate, having used a good talking point once, will likely repeat it. Talking points are a minor staple of political campaigns. The utterance may be fairly spontaneous the first time, but pretty soon it gets embedded in the basic stump speech. Then it gets repeated, and repeated, and repeated, with minor tweaks. Repetition is a characteristic of campaigns. Policy positions get repeated, catchphrases get repeated, jokes get repeated. More superficial observations also get repeated, as if they were good jokes or statements of position.

What many people seem to have forgotten is that Hillary Clinton used the assassination of Robert Kennedy as a repeated talking point in 2008. Since this is not a reminder conveyed in any of the large media outlets this year–catch Wolf Blitzer or Chris Matthews mentioning it–it is being brought up here. Amnesia is lethal to democracy.

Ironically, the question addressed was how long Clinton thought the campaign should continue in 2008, or more precisely, how long she thought she should stay in the race. Thus Hillary Clinton on March 6, 2008, to Time magazine:

[Q] “One group that probably ultimately wouldn’t want it to go on too long is the Democratic Party itself. Can you envision a point at which — if the race stays this close — and with the difficulties that everyone has analyzed in accumulating enough delegates to get any distance ahead where party elders would step in and say “Senators Clinton and Obama, this is now hurting the party and whoever will be the nominee in the fall. We need to figure this out.”

[A] “No I really can’t. I think people have short memories. Primary contests used to last a lot longer. We all remember the great tragedy of Bobby Kennedy being assassinated in June in L.A. My husband didn’t wrap up the nomination in 1992 until June, also in California. Having a primary contest go through June is nothing particularly unusual. We will see how it unfolds as we go forward over the next three to four months.”

For the record, I agree with then-Senator Clinton’s position that the Democratic primary race should continue.

New York, 2016

As a voter and citizen I feel that the primary race should continue through June this year, too.

However, bringing up June, 1992, is different from bringing up June, 1968. Coupling the two is one more manifestation of Hillary Clinton’s almost eerie tone-deafness. Somehow she seems to have trouble conceptually getting on top of the difference between the two races. (Her widely-published graduation speech in 1969, a year after RFK was shot and killed, did not mention the assassinations of 1968 any more than they mentioned the Vietnam War or civil rights.)

Bringing up assassination would have been remarkably poor judgment, from anyone on the campaign trail. Few to no presidential candidates in our nation’s history have volunteered comments on assassination as part of the course of events in politics. In 2008, Clinton’s doing so seemed uncomfortably pointed; she was talking about the insurgent candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, and the insurgent candidacy in 2008 was Senator Barack Obama’s. Anyone who does not realize that Obama was the target of more threats than the norm, by the way, must have been living under the proverbial rock. See Petula Dvorak’s good column here, on the abuse and threats endured by the Obama family even in the White House. This is a difficult and dangerous topic even to touch in print.

Clinton’s remarks to Time in March 2008 were not some one-time slip, an exceptional lapse of some sort, attributable to the exhaustion of campaigning. More than two months later, Clinton was still comfortably repeating here same horse-race talking point.

To clarify: the reminder that Bill Clinton wrapped up the 1992 nomination in June was acceptable in itself. But in her horse-race comments, Hillary Clinton repeatedly linked the 1992 campaign with 1968.

Thus Hillary Clinton on May 7, 2008, in Shepherdstown, West Virginia:

“June of 1992, that’s when Bill really wrapped up the nomination, the middle of June after the California primary. You know, I remember very well what happened in the California primary in 1968 as, you know, Senator Kennedy won that primary.”
Hillary Clinton on May 7, 2008, in Washington, D.C.:

“Sometimes you gotta calm people down a little. But if you look at successful presidential campaigns, my husband did not get the nomination until June of 1992. I remember tragically when Senator Kennedy won California near the end of that nominating process.”

One could argue that Clinton was focused on Senator Kennedy’s having “won California near the end of that nominating process.” Mentioning his winning California rather his being shot there does clean the line up a bit.

If so, however, Clinton backslid again.

Here is Hillary Clinton on May 23, 2008, in Sioux Falls, Idaho:

“[from transcript]

CLINTON: People have been trying to push me out of this ever since Iowa.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Why?

CLINTON: I don`t know. I don`t know. I find it curious because it is — it is unprecedented in history. I don`t understand it. And you know between my opponent and his camp and some in the media, there has been this urgency to end this. And, you know, historically that makes no sense. So I find it a bit of a mystery.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: So, you don`t buy the party unity argument?

CLINTON: I don`t because again, I`ve been around long enough. My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right?

We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. You know, I don`t understand it.”

The remarks provoked a storm of richly deserved criticism. Responses in the New York Daily News were typical:

“Hillary Clinton’s last-gasp campaign suffered a gaping, self-inflicted wound yesterday when she recalled Robert Kennedy’s 1968 assassination while defending her determination to keep running against Barack Obama.

“Meeting with the editorial board of the Argus Leader newspaper in Sioux Falls, S.D., Clinton vigorously defended soldiering on through the last two primaries on June 3.

“My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right?” Clinton said. “We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California.”

Political reaction was swift and unanimously negative. Even Hillary loyalists expressed shock, dismay and private outrage.

It was a rare moment in political circles when Democrats and Republicans alike literally had the same visceral first response:

“Oh. My. God.”

“She said what?” an incredulous Rev. Al Sharpton told the Daily News, adding that the remark reinforced his belief that Clinton should fold her candidacy.

“The danger of her staying in is that she keeps making statements that do serious harm to the party and, increasingly, irreparable harm to her and her legacy,” Sharpton said.

A horrified senior Republican operative added, softly: “She is so finished. What a pathetically stupid thing to say.”

Ironically, one reason the comment aroused shock and dismay was that it seemed to come out of blue–out of left field–when actually, as quoted above, Clinton had repeatedly made the same observation before. It just had not been so widely quoted before.

Even the defense by Clinton supporter Robert Kennedy, Jr., makes the fact plain. Kennedy rushed to damage control, but his pro-Clinton statement explicitly noted that Clinton had said the same thing earlier:

“It is clear from the context that Hillary was invoking a familiar political circumstance to support her decision to stay in the race through June. I have heard her make this reference before, also citing her husband’s 1992 race, both of which were hard-fought through June,” he said in a statement.”

The remark was finally widely reported and noticed in late May of 2008. At that point Sen. Clinton had gotten so comfortable making the observation that she repeated it to a newspaper’s editorial board.

She then issued an apology of sorts:

“CLINTON: I regret, you know, that if my referencing that moment of trauma for our entire nation, and particularly for the Kennedy family, was in any way offensive. I certainly had no intention of that whatsoever.

My view is that we have to look to the past and to our leaders who have inspired us and give us a lot to live up to and I`m honored to hold Senator Kennedy`s seat in the United States Senate from the state of New York and have the highest regard for the entire Kennedy family. Thanks.”

Thanks. Again that eerie complacency, that hint of what-could-possibly-be-the-trouble, joined with a degree of self-exoneration more appropriate to having eaten someone else’s chocolate eclair by honest mistake.

Cleaning up these comments as much as possible, the general observation is that anything can happen in an election.

Election 2016

That being so, it is worth noting that Hillary Rodham Clinton’s allies in the Democratic National Committee and elsewhere have done everything they could to clear the field for Clinton in election 2016.

Why? If Armageddon awaits — cf. all the sinister Clinton references to Trump/Supreme Court/etc — then why would party insiders put all their eggs in one basket? If anything can happen in an election, why would they exclude every other candidate from Joe Biden to Jim Webb? Why did they do their best to prevent anyone else (a sitting Vice President, for example) from even getting into the race? How could that possibly be a good idea? Assuming for sake of argument that every individual super-delegate allied with Clinton honestly felt that Clinton was the best candidate, how could just one candidate possibly be a good idea? Isn’t betting everything on one candidate an act of lunatic risk-taking, in this context?

Another question, of course, is how a bunch of seasoned pols could honestly think the baggage-ridden Clinton was the best bet. Table that one for the moment. Inevitably, at some point, information about pressure points and unsavory if informal quid pro quos will seep out.

Meanwhile, party insiders and the neo-feminists–now more like Ladies Who Lunch–use the behind-the-scenes machinations as a reason to vote for Clinton. We’re the people who put you in the position of having to choose between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Vote for Us!

It used to be called “protection,” as in ‘the protection racket’. Do what we want, so bad things won’t happen to you.

Back to 2008

Having failed to hold Clinton to account for her public musings on assassination in 2008, some large media outlets and, incomprehensibly, some members of Congress then tried to boost Hillary Clinton’s nomination as Vice President.

To put that suggestion in context, let’s recap a few devastating items. First, Hillary Clinton is the only candidate for president in U.S. history openly to reference political assassination on the campaign trail. Second, she did so NOT once or twice, but repeatedly, at least four times on the record, referring specifically to the murder of Robert Kennedy in June, 1968, each time, although not always with the explicit term “assassination.” Third, she started this unsavory line of thought on the campaign trail (so far as is known) after failing to clench the nomination on February 5—after she had said on air, “It’ll all be over Feb. 5.”

Last, the bizarre referencing of assassination was a talking point. The focus was not Robert Kennedy; it was Clinton’s campaign. In Clinton’s bizarrely complacent style, the allusion to Kennedy’s death in a presidential campaign was a box to check in the list of campaign things-to-say, to make her running credible.

As I wrote in 2008, that kind of recklessness jeopardizes public elections, jeopardizes life and limb of prominent candidates. But the possible destructiveness of the comments was subordinate.

Conservative commentator George F. Will tried to write off the justifiable reaction to the assassination references as “synthetic outrage.” But then Will, like the rest of the GOP noise machine, was eager for Clinton to be the Democratic nominee in 2008. The GOP is even more eager for her to be the nominee this time.

Even given the shameless sacrifice of national interest to narrow partisanship, it is still amazing that well-placed figures in media and members of Congress tried in 2008 to push as VP a woman who repeatedly referenced assassination.

The only reason that 2008 trend seems less unbelievable in hindsight is that some of the same people are now trying to push her as POTUS.