Hillary vs. the coffee maker

Did YouTube KILL Hillary, New Media RULE !!

OP-ED COLUMNIST

Hillary’s St. Patrick’s Day Massacre
By FRANK RICH
Published: March 30, 2008

MOST politicians lie. Most people over 50, as I know all too well, misremember things. So here is the one compelling mystery still unresolved about Hillary Clinton’s Bosnia fairy tale: Why did she keep repeating this whopper for nearly three months, well after it had been publicly debunked by journalists and eyewitnesses?

In January, after Senator Clinton first inserted the threat of “sniper fire” into her stump speech, Elizabeth Sullivan of The Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote that the story couldn’t be true because by the time of the first lady’s visit in March 1996, “the war was over.” Meredith Vieira asked Mrs. Clinton on the “Today” show why, if she was on the front lines, she took along a U.S.O. performer like Sinbad. Earlier this month, a week before Mrs. Clinton fatefully rearmed those snipers one time too many, Sinbad himself spoke up to The Washington Post: “I think the only ‘red phone’ moment was: Do we eat here or at the next place?”

Yet Mrs. Clinton was undeterred. She dismissed Sinbad as a “comedian” and recycled her fiction once more on St. Patrick’s Day. When Michael Dobbs fact-checked it for The Post last weekend and proclaimed it worthy of “four Pinocchios,” her campaign pushed back. The Clinton camp enforcer Howard Wolfson phoned in to “Morning Joe” on MSNBC Monday and truculently quoted a sheaf of news stories that he said supported her account. Only later that day, a full week after her speech, did he start to retreat, suggesting it was “possible” she “misspoke” in the “most recent instance” of her retelling of her excellent Bosnia adventure.

Since Mrs. Clinton had told a similar story in previous instances, this was misleading at best. It was also dishonest to characterize what she had done as misspeaking — or as a result of sleep deprivation, as the candidate herself would soon assert. The Bosnia anecdote was part of her prepared remarks, scripted and vetted with her staff. Not that it mattered anymore. The self-inflicted damage had been done. The debate about Barack Obama’s relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright was almost smothered in the rubble of Mrs. Clinton’s Bosnian bridge too far.

Which brings us back to our question: Why would so smart a candidate play political Russian roulette with virtually all the bullet chambers loaded?

Sometimes only a shrink can decipher why some politicians persist in flagrantly taking giant risks, all but daring others to catch them in the act (see: Spitzer, Eliot). Carl Bernstein, a sometimes admiring Hillary Clinton biographer, has called the Bosnia debacle “a watershed event” for her campaign because it revives her long history of balancing good works with “ ‘misstatements’ and elisions,” from the health-care task force fiasco onward.

But this event may be a watershed for two other reasons that have implications beyond Mrs. Clinton’s character and candidacy, spilling over into the 2008 campaign as a whole. It reveals both the continued salience of that supposedly receding issue, the Iraq war, and the accelerating power of viral politics, as exemplified by YouTube, to override the retail politics still venerated by the Beltway establishment.

What’s been lost in the furor over Mrs. Clinton’s Bosnia fairy tale is that her disastrous last recycling of it, the one that blew up in her face, kicked off her major address on the war, timed to its fifth anniversary. Still unable to escape the stain of the single most damaging stand in her public career, she felt compelled to cloak herself, however fictionally, in an American humanitarian intervention that is not synonymous with quagmire.

Perhaps she thought that by taking the huge gamble of misspeaking one more time about her narrow escape on the tarmac at Tulza, she could compensate for misvoting on Iraq. Instead, her fictionalized derring-do may have stirred national trace memories of two of the signature propaganda stunts of the war: the Rambo myth the Pentagon concocted for Pvt. Jessica Lynch and President Bush’s flyboy antics on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln during “Mission Accomplished.”

That Mrs. Clinton’s campaign kept insisting her Bosnia tale was the truth two days after The Post exposed it as utter fiction also shows the political perils of 20th-century analog arrogance in a digital age. Incredible as it seems, the professionals around Mrs. Clinton — though surely knowing her story was false — thought she could tough it out. They ignored the likelihood that a television network would broadcast the inevitable press pool video of a first lady’s foreign trip — as the CBS Evening News did on Monday night — and that this smoking gun would then become an unstoppable assault weapon once harnessed to the Web.

The Drudge Report’s link to the YouTube iteration of the CBS News piece transformed it into a cultural phenomenon reaching far beyond a third-place network news program’s nightly audience. It had more YouTube views than the inflammatory Wright sermons, more than even the promotional video of Britney Spears making her latest “comeback” on a TV sitcom. It was as this digital avalanche crashed down that Mrs. Clinton, backed into a corner, started offering the alibi of “sleep deprivation” and then tried to reignite the racial fires around Mr. Wright.

The Clinton campaign’s cluelessness about the Web has been apparent from the start, and not just in its lagging fund-raising. Witness the canned Hillary Web “chats” and “Hillcasts,” the soupy Web contest to choose a campaign song (the winner, an Air Canada advertising jingle sung by Celine Dion, was quickly dumped), and the little-watched electronic national town-hall meeting on the eve of Super Tuesday. Web surfers have rejected these stunts as the old-school infomercials they so blatantly are.

Senator Obama, for all his campaign’s Internet prowess, made his own media mistake by not getting ahead of the inevitable emergence of commercially available Wright videos on both cable TV and the Web. But he got lucky. YouTube videos of a candidate in full tilt or full humiliation, we’re learning, can outdraw videos of a candidate’s fire-breathing pastor. Both the CBS News piece on Mrs. Clinton in Bosnia and the full video of Mr. Obama’s speech on race have drawn more views than the most popular clips of a raging Mr. Wright.

But the political power of the Bosnia incident speaks at least as much to the passions aroused by the war as to the media dynamics of the Web. For all the economic anxiety roiling Americans, they have not forgotten Iraq. The anger can rise again in a flash when stoked by events on the ground or politicians at home, as it has throughout the rites surrounding the fifth anniversary of the invasion and 4,000th American combat death. This will keep happening as it becomes more apparent that the surge is a stalemate, bringing neither lower troop levels nor anything more than a fragile temporary stability to Iraq. John McCain’s apparent obliviousness to this fact remains a boon to the Democrats.

The war is certainly a bigger issue in 2008 than race. Yet it remains a persistent Beltway refrain that race will hinder Mr. Obama at every turn, no matter how often reality contradicts the thesis. Whites wouldn’t vote for a black man in states like Iowa and New Hampshire; whites wouldn’t vote for blacks in South Carolina; blacks wouldn’t vote for a black man who wasn’t black enough. The newest incessantly repeated scenario has it that Mr. Obama’s fate now all depends on a stereotypical white blue-collar male voter in the apotheosized rust belt town of Deer Hunter, Pa.

Well, Mr. Obama isn’t going to win every white vote. But two big national polls late last week, both conducted since he addressed the Wright controversy, found scant change in Mr. Obama’s support. In The Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey, his white support was slightly up. As the pollster Peter Hart put it, this result was “a myth buster.” The noisy race wars have failed to stop Mr. Obama just as immigration hysteria didn’t defeat Senator McCain, the one candidate in his party who refused to pander to the Lou Dobbs brigades.

The myth that’s been busted is one that Mr. Obama talked about in his speech — the perennial given that American racial relations are doomed to stew eternally in the Jim Crow poisons that forged generations like Mr. Wright’s. Yet if you sampled much political commentary of the past two weeks, you’d think it’s still 1968, or at least 1988. The default assumptions are that the number of racists in America remains fixed, no matter what the generational turnover, and that the Wright videos will terrorize white folks just as the Willie Horton ads did when the G.O.P. took out Michael Dukakis.

But politically and culturally we’re not in the 1980s — or pre-YouTube 2004 — anymore. An unending war abroad is upstaging the old domestic racial ghosts. A new bottom-up media culture is challenging any candidate’s control of a message.

The 2008 campaign is, unsurprisingly enough, mostly of a piece with 2006, when Iraq cost Republicans the Congress. In that year’s signature race, a popular Senate incumbent, George Allen, was defeated by a war opponent in the former Confederate bastion of Virginia after being caught race-baiting in a video posted on the Web. Last week Mrs. Clinton learned the hard way that Iraq, racial gamesmanship and viral video can destroy a Democrat, too.

Bill Clinton: John McCain and Hillary are 'very close'

Bill Clinton:
John McCain and Hillary
are 'very close'

January 25, 2008

(CNN) — If Hillary Clinton and John McCain become their party's presidential nominees, the general election race is likely to be a love-fest.

At least according to Bill Clinton.

Campaigning in Spartanburg, South Carolina, Friday, the former president brushed aside suggestions his wife would prove to be a divisive nominee for the Democratic Party, pointing out how she has successfully worked with Republicans in the Senate — including one of the current GOP presidential candidates.

"She and John McCain are very close," Clinton said. "They always laugh that if they wound up being the nominees of their party, it would be the most civilized election in American history, and they're afraid they'd put the voters to sleep because they like and respect each other."

The comments may not be welcome by the McCain camp — which yesterday faced fire from several of its rivals for winning the backing of the New York Times — a longtime archenemy of conservatives.

Sens. McCain and Clinton last met publicly at an ABC debate earlier January, when presidential candidates of both parties shared the same stage. The two were seen exchanging pleasantries, and a Clinton side said she told the Arizona senator he’d done a “good job” staging a comeback in New Hampshire. He asked that she say hello to Bill Clinton for him.

– CNN Ticker Producer Alexander Mooney


Oklahoma House speaker endorses McCain for president

Woman opens home to Clinton for fundraising

Woman opens home to
Clinton for fundraising
By Michael McNutt
Capitol Bureau
Sun January 20, 2008

While her husband works to get people to open their wallets for Hillary Rodham Clinton, Susan Turpen opens her home.

Susan Turpen has held three events in the past eight years for Clinton in the couple's Oklahoma City home.

"It's exciting that we finally have a real, real qualified person who's not just the best woman to ever run, but I think in 2008 is the best candidate running regardless of party,” Susan Turpen said.

She became acquainted with Clinton through her husband, Mike, a former state attorney general and state Democratic Party chairman who met Bill Clinton in 1983 and served as his Oklahoma campaign manager in 1992 and 1996.

Mike Turpen is Hillary Clinton's finance director in Oklahoma, and Susan Turpen said she likes organizing events and keeping her husband's fundraising database in order.

"I've done my time in phone banks and stuff like that,” she said.

"I bring the gifts of organization, good follow-up for Mike and event planning.”

A fundraiser for Hillary Clinton was held in 2000 in the Turpen home when she was running for the U.S. Senate seat from New York.

Her home was the site of another fundraiser last year for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.

She held a breakfast last week at her house for about 85 women who either supported Hillary Clinton or wanted more information about the two-term New York senator.

Susan Turpen said she met the Clintons through her husband and the couple got to know the Clintons well, spending a couple of nights in the White House during Bill Clinton's presidency.

Why does woman look up to candidate?

Her enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton's presidential candidacy is more because of her long record of public service than out of friendship, she said.
Hillary Clinton early in her career worked for the Children's Defense Fund and she ran a legal aid clinic for the poor in Arkansas before her husband was elected governor.

"Her life has not been a career of self-promotion,” Susan Turpen said.

"It's been a life about helping other people. And now she's trying to get to the highest forum where she can then impact other people's lives and make a difference in their lives.”

Clinton also knows the issues, and she's willing to take risks for causes she believes in, Susan Turpen said.

"She was a risk-taker when she did the health care initiative when her husband was president,” she said.

"She's a good listener, too. And I think, gender wise, women are better listeners and perhaps have more empathy.”

Turpen said she also likes the idea that a Clinton win would bring Bill Clinton back to the White House as an adviser.

"She was a key policy adviser for him and I think he will be a key policy adviser for her,” she said.

"When you find that dynamic duo, that's just very exciting for not only America but for the world.”

Bill Plans Oklahoma Campaign Stop for Hillary

X-President Clinton is coming to Oklahoma to speak on behalf of his wife's presidential bid days before the state's Feb. 5 presidential primary

Bill Clinton will be in Oklahoma on Jan. 30, said Isaac Baker, a spokesman for Sen. Hillary Clinton's campaign.

Clinton supporters in Oklahoma were told Thursday the former president was expected to speak at the University of Oklahoma and appear later at a fundraising event for his wife's campaign.

OU President David Boren, who this week again extended an offer to presidential candidates of both parties and their spouses to speak at OU, would not confirm a Clinton appearance at OU or the appearance of any presidential candidate or candidate's spouse.

Mike Turpen, Hillary Clinton's finance director in Oklahoma, said the Clinton campaign "is seriously considering the invitation from David Boren and OU to appear on campus.”

Turpen, who is hoping to put together a fundraiser featuring the former president, said he has been trying "very hard to get Bill Clinton's feet on the ground in the Sooner State.”

Plans for the fundraiser and speech were revealed Thursday morning by Tamera Luzzatto, Hillary Clinton's chief of staff, during a breakfast meeting. The meeting was held at the home of Mike and Susan Turpen. Hosts included two former Oklahoma first ladies, Donna Nigh and Rhonda Walters, and Secretary of State Susan Savage.

Hillary Clinton came to Oklahoma twice in 2007, appearing at private fundraisers in Oklahoma City and in Tulsa.