Razzle Dazzle
Hillary Wings Her Credibility

By RICHARD STEIER

For all the mistakes she and her supporters have made so far this year, Hillary Clinton had not provided her opposition with a ready-made campaign ad until she claimed two weeks ago that she had braved sniper fire during a visit to Bosnia 12 years ago.

It was an unforced error that she was forced to acknowledge March 24 after TV footage of her 1996 visit to Tuzla showed her walking across the tarmac accompanied by her then-teenage daughter Chelsea and being welcomed by a delegation of Bosnians that included an 8-year-old girl.

"So I misspoke," New York's junior Senator said when asked about the videotape, which made clear that she and others at the airport of that Bosnian city were not dodging bullets or otherwise under siege. The New York Times quoted retired Maj. Gen. William Nash, who at the time was the commander of U.S. troops in that turbulent nation and was with her at the airport, saying, "There was no sniper threat that I know of."

A More-Experienced Fabricator?

Resumé-padding is always a dicey proposition for political candidates, and particularly so for Senator Clinton, since she has geared so much of the argument for choosing her over Barack Obama to her claim of greater experience and its value in coping with the challenges of being President. Including experience of the imaginary or embellished kind does not do much to further that cause.

SELF-INFLICTED WOUND: Sen. Hillary Clinton's false claim that she faced sniper fire during a visit to Bosnia in 1996 is the most-pronounced of a series of blunders that have cost her ground in both the campaign for the Democratic nomination and a potential general-election run.

And in her previous warnings about the pounding that Senator Obama would take from the "Republican attack machine" if Democrats made him their nominee, Ms. Clinton suggested that having run that gantlet already, she would do a better job of standing up to it.

That claim withers, however, when she furnishes such ripe material for exploitation.

Mr. Obama's campaign has had its share of stumbles. The ones that could be most easily used against him during the fall campaign would be the overheated anti-American rhetoric voiced on more than one occasion by his longtime pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and his wife Michelle's statement in Madison, Wisc. six weeks ago, "For the first time in my adult lifetime, I'm really proud of my country, and not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change."

It's not hard to imagine either John McCain's campaign or one of the outside groups supporting him mining Reverend Wright's greatest hits for an extended ad noting that this is the guy Senator Obama has relied on for spiritual guidance for two decades. (They would run the risk, of course, of the Obama campaign countering by spotlighting the statements of an influential evangelical Christian pastor who is backing Senator McCain, John Hagee, who among other things has suggested that Hurricane Katrina was God's retribution against New Orleans for hosting a gay pride parade, called Catholicism "A Godless theology of hate" and the Catholic Church "The Great Whore," and, while fervently supporting Israel, written that anti-Semitism "rises from the judgment of God upon his rebellious chosen people.")

Ms. Obama's remark - which the McCain camp highlighted by having the candidate's wife, Cindy, make a rare public statement noting that she had always been proud of her country - is the kind of ill-considered statement (unless Mr. Obama were running for President of, say, the War Resisters League) that is sure to be used against her husband if he gets the Democratic nomination. It could be argued that it laid the foundation for Bill Clinton's recent remark that it would really be swell if the race in November boiled down to the two candidates who really loved their country, and so the only issue was whose vision of America the voters thought superior.

Bill's Trips on the Low Road

That statement, like a couple of others the former President made before and just after the South Carolina Democratic primary that seemed intended to cast Senator Obama as an under-qualified candidate with limited appeal beyond his race, crossed beyond the line for tough but fair campaigning. (Given the questioning of his own patriotism over his efforts to avoid military service during the Vietnam era that was a feature of the 1992 presidential campaign, Mr. Clinton might have been expected to show some restraint about playing that card, but he appears to be at a point where he no longer feels others' pain.)

It takes some explaining to illustrate why, however, those statements veered into foul territory, limiting their potential for use in 30-second negative-ad spots that serve as the shock troops in the battle for voters' hearts, if not their minds.

Senator Clinton's sniper-fire claim doesn't require a back story. You just run the TV clips of her talking about it, then play the 12-year-old video of the actual scene at the airport, and have an announcer say something arch. It might not be as effective as the ads that George Bush the Elder's camp ran of Michael Dukakis sitting in a tank with a helmet on 20 years ago, but since Senator McCain's wartime service is better-known than the former President's, it wouldn't have to be to use the contrast to maximum effect.

Can't Replicate Reagan

Given the damage done, at a point in the campaign when she has virtually no margin for error, the question is, how could Senator Clinton have been so foolish as to spin a fable that she knew would unravel once the old news footage was uncovered? The embellishment was apparently served up in several different campaign stops in recent months, even though it was at odds with Ms. Clinton's own account of the Bosnia trip in her 2003 memoir, "Living History."

President Reagan sometimes recounted as true stories things that had occurred only in movies he had seen or appeared in. His blurring of fantasy and reality, however, never gave him a heroic war record or an Academy Award, and many people were more inclined to just shrug and chalk it up as a product of his advancing age and a forgivable blunder by an amiable man.

Much of the public, guided more than a bit by the media, does not regard Ms. Clinton as similarly amiable, although a strong case could be made that she cares more about those struggling to make it in this country than Mr. Reagan ever did. He was always underrated as an actor, perhaps because he was not as effective outside a persona of amiable earnestness as his more-complicated and gifted contemporary, Jimmy Stewart. But the qualities that carried his best film roles were the ideal ones for being a real-life commander-in-chief, and they came far more naturally to him than public displays of warmth and cheerfulness do to Ms. Clinton.

Candor Comes Uneasily

When she is dealing with facts about government and its programs, she is comfortable and authoritative; when she is called on to display the other skills of a politician, you can see the gears turning as she tries to calibrate her answers for maximum benefit rather than simply saying what she believes.

Her uneasy relationship with the media is evident from the number of commentators, including more than a few who are in sync with her on many issues, who have suggested that if she were not so bullheaded and self-absorbed, she would have bowed to mathematical reality by now and stepped out of the race rather than continuing to battle Senator Obama. They argue that in trying to come back, she has changed the tenor of the campaign in such a way that whoever gets the nomination might wind up losing the election despite the advantages the Democrats seem to have based on President Bush's failures in office and Mr. McCain's support of his policies in areas where he is most unpopular: the war in Iraq and the economy.

The argument goes that with both Florida and Michigan eliminated from the Democratic contest by the decision not to rerun their premature primaries, she has no realistic hope of overtaking Mr. Obama on either the delegate count or the popular vote. It has even been speculated that she has decided that if she can't win the nomination, she would rather that Mr. McCain was elected so that she would get one more shot at the presidency in 2012, and so has no qualms about weakening Mr. Obama with both direct attacks and remarks by herself and her husband that indicate they believe the Republican standard-bearer is more qualified to be President than her Democratic rival.

No Questioning Obama

There is no question that Senator Clinton overplayed her hand in trying to have those states' original votes counted, at least in part, but it is notable that Senator Obama has drawn little criticism for his own campaign's maneuverings to avert a rerun in two states which now could wind up going to Mr. McCain in November if a sizable number of Democrats there rebel at being deprived of a say in choosing the nominee.

From a practical standpoint, it's hard to see how Democrats could feel great confidence in Mr. Obama's chances of election if he can't defeat her in Pennsylvania April 22. For those who say his edge to this point on delegates and popular vote demonstrate that he is the best standard-bearer even if he can't win a single large-state primary outside his own one in Illinois, a baseball analogy is in order. In 2006, the Yankees won two more games than the Detroit Tigers during the regular season and the Mets had 14 more wins than the St. Louis Cardinals, yet both New York teams lost to their Midwestern rivals in the playoffs. Neither outcome was a shock: in both cases the home-town teams' weaknesses became more pronounced in the post-season while their opponents' superior pitching asserted itself.

The latest national polls show Mr. McCain with a slight lead over either Democratic candidate. He could be undone by his positions on key issues, or by a temper that has been known to undermine an image he has tried to craft in Mr. Reagan's mold, but there is no reason to believe that he will turn into an easy mark during the coming seven months. And that means there should not be a rush to the easy and obvious conclusion that Mr. Obama has a small if not-insignificant lead in the two areas that are supposed to be the prime criteria for picking the nominee, and by dint of that deserves the nomination (and I say this as someone who voted for Mr. Obama two months ago).

Bucking Electoral History

He has brought changes to the electoral map during the primaries that are striking enough to raise the possibility that he could win states in November that do not ordinarily go Democratic. But if he doesn't, and his double-digit failures against Ms. Clinton in places like New York and California aren't reversed when his opponent is a conservative Republican, there is the potential for a major defeat for Senator Obama and the Democrats.

Ms. Clinton seems less likely to be involved in a blowout, either for or against. The tenacity that has kept her going this far would figure to keep the race close, and her edgier style might actually be more effective in riling up Mr. McCain. On the other hand, that style, combined with the opposition a significant segment of the country and the media may harbor toward choosing a woman, or, more to the point, the woman who is Bill Clinton's wife, creates enough negative sentiment that a narrow victory might be the best she could expect.

And first she has to get through Pennsylvania, and convincingly, to be able to make that case. Three weeks out, she can't afford any replication of the four-day stretch in which New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson cut his long-time Clinton ties and endorsed Mr. Obama - earning a ridiculous if not unexpected comparison to Judas Iscariot by old Clinton family Doberman James Carville - and she shot herself in several vital organs with her sniper tale.

Eclipsed Mortgage Plan

The timing of its exposure was terrible, since it came on the same day that she sought to burnish her credentials as the candidate best-equipped to pull the nation from its economic woes with a speech laying out her proposal for dealing with the home-mortgage crisis.

Stepping on major policy speeches to do damage control is never a good way to run a campaign, and having to do so at this stage was particularly difficult. But as if to prove that he was as capable of boosting her chances as she was of aiding her rivals', Senator McCain chose the following day to trot out his own home-mortgage proposal, one that underscored the differences between the two parties when it comes to helping those who had a hand in their own misfortunes.

Mr. McCain said that he did not favor major intervention to help the casualties of the sub-prime mortgage debacle, contending that "it is not the duty of government to bail out and reward those who act irresponsibly, whether they are big banks or small borrowers."

At first blush, there was an admirable flintiness in taking a position that was sure to be controversial but utterly consistent with the principle of self-reliance that is supposed to be a bedrock of Republican Party philosophy.

Bullish on 'Bear' Bailout

But Mr. McCain did not hew to that principle when it came to the bailout of Bear Stearns by the Federal Reserve a few days earlier, with an infusion of $30 billion that happened to be the same amount Ms. Clinton had proposed to deal with the home-mortgage mess.

Mr. McCain's justification for his divergent positions was that allowing Bear Stearns to collapse in the debris of its fiscal recklessness would have had a serious ripple effect on both Wall Street and the national economy. It sounded, however, like fodder for a Democratic attack ad focusing on a candidate who held ordinary people to a far harsher standard than big investors, offering succor to greedy gamblers and the back of the hand to those presumptuous enough to live the American dream of home-ownership without the financial means to back it up.

It evoked memories of David Stockman's experience when he became President Reagan's first budget director and attempted to put his conservative principles into effect, arguing that the way to get government spending under control was to put every Federal program under the microscope and cut or eliminate funding for those that were unsuccessful or unworthy.

By the end of Mr. Reagan's first year in office, Mr. Stockman was largely disillusioned by what had happened when his theories bumped up against entrenched interests in Washington.

Them That's Got Shall Get

A December 1981 article in the Atlantic Monthly based on extensive interviews over the course of that year with Mr. Stockman reflected his experience: attempts to cut international trade subsidies for major corporations, dairy subsidies for large farm operations and bloated defense contracts had all foundered when lobbyists and their allies in both Congress and the administration mobilized against them. This forced even greater cuts in programs whose prime constituents were the poor. The net effect was that ketchup was classified as a vegetable to reduce the costs of the Federal school-lunch program while corporate interests continued to receive heaping helpings of pork. Describing the lobbying on the Reagan tax-cut bill that was enacted, Mr. Stockman told writer William Greider, "The hogs were really feeding."

Mr. Bush's tax cuts are the grandchildren of that era, once again skewed to benefit the wealthiest Americans (a "Trojan horse" was how Mr. Stockman came to regard Mr. Reagan's across-the-board cuts that made palatable huge tax breaks for the wealthy by giving scraps to those further down the economic scale). And so Mr. McCain's disparate views on the Bears Stearns bailout and similar relief for those battered by the sub-prime mortgage crisis, coupled with his support for a Bush tax-cut plan that he originally was one of the few Republican Senators to oppose, places him in sharp contrast to whichever Democrat will eventually oppose him in the general election.

Fogging the Focus

Given the mood of the country, it would seem that the odds would be heavily against him prevailing. But Mr. Bush's record during his first four years in office argued strongly against his being given a second term, until his campaign was able to change the focus of the campaign to social issues like gay marriage and distort John Kerry's war record to make it seem like a genuine war hero was less manly and patriotic than an incumbent who had used family connections to avoid serving in Vietnam.

Senator Clinton's campaign has often seemed to embrace that same "gotcha" mentality, relying on caricature as a counterweight to Senator Obama's charisma. She said virtually nothing in response to his speech on race until a week later - as she was trying to extricate herself from her sniper mess - when she said she would not have continued attending services conducted by someone with Reverend Wright's views. She still hasn't been able to publicly admit that she let political considerations get in the way of her better judgment when she voted to authorize President Bush to invade Iraq.

And yet she has hung in and remains a viable contender for the Democratic nomination, having marshaled her forces and produced a winning flurry each time Mr. Obama seemed close to finishing her off. He's been a formidable opponent, but it has increasingly begun to seem as if, in both positive and negative ways, she controls her own destiny this election year.