The Story

Every campaign contest has a main story that emerges -- that of the victor -- and dozens of side stories and subplots, all of which play a part in the main narrative, no matter how tangential. Without a doubt, the big story this week, the one that seems to be peaking but might not ever go away anymore, is that of Hillary Clinton's "war tale", her whopper.

Josh Marshall and the crew at Talking Points Memo have put together a fascinating, rather complete collection of clips that for the first time showed me the breadth of this campaign disaster. It's not just Hillary vs. the news footage, it's everybody who was associated with the trip that could get near a microphone, from accompanying journalist Andrea Mitchell to the pilot who landed the airplane in Bosnia, all united in revealing Clinton's story as a crock. And to his credit, there's no smear material in the piece:

With the exception of Howard Wolfson, Sen. Clinton's Communications Director, we've tried only to include material from the senator, the trip and people who were actually there and witnesses to anything -- so no random ex-military folks or campaign spinners or Fox goons just there to trash her.

Is it possible the news cycles beyond this? Or is this now the punchline, a check to be cashed over and over again by late night comedians like the name, "Spitzer":

There is really little left to say. For all of Clinton's arguments about Obama's lack of experience, this lie shows her supposed foreign policy advantage for what it is: The misty water-colored memories of an egotist.

This will be the punch-line of every statement made about her campaign from here on out. "Sniper fire" will be what the invention of the internet was to Al Gore, except, in this case, Clinton actually said the words which will be used to demonstrate her falsity.

The worst part of the lie is that it's ridiculous. Not only is it not true, the lie itself does nothing more to justify Clinton's foreign policy experience and seems merely an attempt to build some sort of drama. Hell, I was in Bosnia for nine months. I slept with the sounds of RPG fire troubling my dreams and, even shook a bunch of hands, too. I spent a year in Afghanistan and once awoke during a C-130 flight to find the plane shucking and jiving to avoid a shoulder-launched surface-to-air rocket. I spent hours in bunkers during mortar and rocket attacks (which really isn't as scary as it sounds, since the bad guys lacked both the equipment and the cojones required to make their attacks accurate). I also ate meals with provincial governors and (supposedly former) warlords, smoked hookah pipes with Herati shopkeepers and shook hands Hamid Karzai himself.

None of those things make me a foreign policy expert.

Senator Clinton's superior organization has been the only thing keeping her in the running. Were she just another candidate, she would have been out of this race some time ago and Senator Obama would be spending his time--our party's precious time--going after the Republican nominee. After this embarrassing stumble--which would most assuredly come back to bite Clinton in the general election--I think Clinton is toast.

Lastly, what does the story say about Sen. Clinton as a parent?

Hillary's venture into sniper fire may have been merely a confused delusion but the question arises: what kind of parent fantasizes about willfully placing her daughter in such a perilous situation?...

...I suspect that Hillary may have fantasized herself into a heroic situation. While this is not an uncommon reverie, it is an extremely dangerous presidential indulgence. From a President's daydream, it is just one more step to using the globe in fulfilling one's longing for grandeur, honor, and heroism.

Doubly dangerous it is to bring one's child, even in fantasy, along for the ride. Who would do this? In our current primary season, turning on questions of character as well as on particular issues, the public has every right to speculate as to what drives basically good people to deceive themselves. Hillary is probably not a scheming liar in the traditional sense of the word, but this is a vignette that reveals a gilding of the nonexistent lily. It suggests her perceptions cannot be trusted under stress. It also implies that her need for power or glory is such that she is willing to sacrifice her child's safety in her own fantasy. How would it then stand with the rest of us?

Nothing fascinates us more than a story with an ironic twist. This one turns on the very phrase she used as the basis for her campaign legitimacy: Ready on Day One.

Sure, Ready on Day One.

To implode.

Just Another Liar

So now Hillary Clinton herself admits that she "misspoke" in her long public statement regarding her landing in Bosnia, per her endorsement-seeking interview with the editors of the Philadelphia Daily News today:

"Now let me tell you what I can remember, OK -- because what I was told was that we had to land a certain way and move quickly because of the threat of sniper fire. So I misspoke -- I didn't say that in my book or other times but if I said something that made it seem as though there was actual fire -- that's not what I was told. I was told we had to land a certain way, we had to have our bulletproof stuff on because of the threat of sniper fire. I was also told that the greeting ceremony had been moved away from the tarmac but that there was this 8-year-old girl and, I can't, I can't rush by her, I've got to at least greet her -- so I greeted her, I took her stuff and then I left, Now that's my memory of it.

I followed-up, noting that the episode has raised questions about her credibility on foreign policy. She responded:

"No, I went to 80 countries, you know. I gave contemporaneous accounts, I wrote about a lot of this in my book. you know, I think that, a minor blip, you know, if I said something that, you know, I say a lot of things -- millions of words a day -- so if I misspoke, that was just a mistatement."

Millions of words a day.

How many of them true?

If her supporters think this isn't going to be the "Al Gore invented the Internet" cudgel used by Republicans (and alienated Dems) to beat her general election chances into the ground, should she succeed in wresting the Democratic Presidential nomination from leader Barack Obama, they are inhaling the very substance Bill Clinton claims he did not.

I posted the video yesterday, but here's a link just in case you missed it.

This goes to the heart of the biggest complaint against the Clintons: They will do anything to win and love power more than truth. It neatly undermines her supposed strength, her pumped up claims of "experience", particularly foreign policy experience, over Obama.

Will it reach the low-information Democratic voters she's been relying on, Rove-like, for so much of this contest? Is the media too cowed by the Clintons to make it known?

The weird thing is that she didn't have to lie, she went there, did her thing, and whatever it was, it counts for something. Just not as much as she is trying to make it count.

It's not the actions of a fearless leader. It's the lie of a cynical, fundamentally frightened politician.

And yes, it matters that she lies.