From The Times
March 28, 2008
Hillary Clinton; fibber in chief
Her blatant deceit over Bosnia, among other lies, is about the last nail in
her coffinGerard Baker
A good memory is needed once we have lied," observed Pierre Corneille, the
17th-century French tragedian. He was right. The complexities involved in
keeping an untruth plausible and consistent are so tortuous that to be
really good at lying demands exceptional recall of what was said when and
where.
But Corneille was writing before the age of YouTube. Nowadays, no amount of
familiarity with memory's labyrinth will save you when there is downloadable
disproof at the click of a mouse button. So Hillary Clinton discovered this
week, when she was caught out in a prize fib about a trip she made to Bosnia
when she was First Lady 12 years ago.
Dilating on her extensive experience of foreign affairs, the New York
senator told a campaign event last week that she vividly remembered how,
with the Balkans still a cauldron of war, she had flown into an airfield
under sniper fire. She had had to dash, head-down from the aircraft, she
told the spellbound audience, to the safety of waiting cars, and the planned
traditional arrival ceremony had been hastily cancelled in the mêlée.
It sounded thrilling - like something out of a Tom Clancy novel. The problem
was, it probably did come out of a Tom Clancy novel. It was pure fiction.
CBS unearthed some news video of the arrival ceremony and it was promptly
disseminated on YouTube. There was Mrs Clinton, serene and smiling,
strolling with her entourage from the plane, head held high, and in no
evident danger from snipers, terrorists, or even the odd slightly miffed
Serb. Seconds later she was being greeted in what looked very much like a
traditional arrival ceremony on the tarmac where a small girl embraced her
and the two chatted warmly for a while. I've been in more physical danger
coming out of the car park at Heathrow.
Confronted with the incontrovertible evidence Mrs Clinton acknowledged this
week that she "misspoke". Misspeak is an Orwellian term deployed by
politicians to describe what has happened when they have been caught in a
barefaced lie.
The Clintons have a well-formed habit of misspeaking. Bill Clinton, of
course, was always doing it. But his wife has also over the years mastered
the art of misspeaking in what Mark Twain once described as an "experienced,
industrious, ambitious and often quite picturesque" way.
She has misspoken on any number of occasions when the straight truth might
have been very damaging: over her involvement in the various scandals of the
early Clinton years. But alongside these instrumental whoppers, there have
been some befuddlingly pointless little tiddlers too.
For no obvious reason she once claimed her parents named her after Sir
Edmund Hillary, even though she was born more than five years before the
mountaineer's ascent of Everest, when he was known by almost no one outside
New Zealand.
When she ran for New York senator she claimed to have been a lifelong fan of
the New York Yankees even though no one could recall her ever having
expressed the slightest interest in or knowledge of the baseball team.
In fact the facility with which the Clintons misspeak is so pronounced that
it is quite possible they have genuinely forgotten how to tell the plain
truth. There was no real need for Mrs Clinton to make the claim about
landing in sniper fire. But the compulsion to embroider, to dissemble and to
dissimulate is now so entrenched in the synapses of the Clinton brain that
it came to her as naturally as the truth would to a slow-witted innocent.
Someone once noted that the thing about the Clintons is that they will
choose a big lie when a small lie will do, and choose a small lie when the
truth will do. Most of the time they get away with it. But occasionally, an
inconvenient truth, like a blue dress with DNA on it, or some forgotten news
footage, shows up and damns them.
The Bosnia misspeak, unnecessary as it was, revealed much, however. It
helped to expose a much bigger untruth Mrs Clinton has been peddling
throughout the Democratic primary campaign - that her time in the White
House means she has the necessary foreign policy experience to be president.
First Ladies don't acquire real foreign policy experience. We know that Mrs
Clinton did not, as she claimed, play a large role in the Northern Ireland
peace process, that she was not, as she claimed, a key voice in counsels on
the Balkans, and that she did not even have security clearance in the White
House for the most sensitive of conversations about national security.
So the problem with the ripping yarn about the Bosnia snipers is that it
offers hard evidentiary disproof of improbable claims about her role during
the White House years.
With this latest deceit stripped away, there is not much left to Mrs
Clinton's disintegrating campaign for the Democratic nomination. It capped a
bad week for her, a week that might have signalled the end of her hopes.
With a deft speech that was somewhat lacking in complete honesty itself,
Barack Obama last week seemed to have acquitted himself quite well, for now,
of the charge of being an associate of a ranting, anti-American black
preacher. More important, the collapse last week of efforts to schedule a
new vote in Florida and Michigan, two states whose earlier primary votes
have been disqualified, was deadly to Mrs Clinton. It is now virtually
impossible for her to finish ahead of Mr Obama in the delegate count when
the primary season ends in early June.
That really ought to be that. After that final primary in Puerto Rico on
June 1, Mr Obama will have won more states, more delegates and more popular
votes than Mrs Clinton. How in those circumstances can Mrs Clinton claim a
moral case for staying in the race?
Her answer is to persuade the party's super-delegates - top party leaders
and elected officials who will have the casting votes - that she is more
electable than Mr Obama, and that they would be doing the party a favour if
they chose her over the wishes of the tens of millions of people who have
voted in the primaries.
They are unlikely to be taken in. They are more likely to view it as another
example of Senator Clinton's misspeaking.
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