Hillary Clinton for President - 2008

There is the First Gentleman who will be at hand for consultation and advice as he has presidential experience. Two heads are better than one.

"I did not have a chance to see or to read yet Sen. Obama's speech. But I'm very glad that he gave it. It's an important topic. Issues of race and gender in America have been complicated throughout our history, and they are complicated in this primary campaign.

"There have been detours and pitfalls along the way. But we should remember that this is an historic moment for the Democratic Party, and for our country. We will be nominating the first African-American or woman for the Presidency of the United States, and that is something that all Americans can and should celebrate."

Just the same, immediately after I read the speech, I wondered whether HRC could have made a similar speech re gender and/or race. The opportune time would have been the nexus of Matthews/tears/boys' club/Steinem op-ed after the NH primary. She could have spoken about the glass ceiling, perceptions of women in power, the government's continued neglect of issues related to women's health and welfare, the de facto cliques that keep women with children from advancing up the corporate ladder, the consistent wage differences between men and women. And as another theme, about how patriarchy also pressures men to conform to unrealistic standards of providence, forces them outside domestic sphere even though some would probably want a larger role, about how focusing on negative and accusatory statements prevents us from seeing the advantages of moving forward into a world where men and women share equal duties in the private and public sphere.

Or hell, she could have taken some time after Nevada and addressed the stuff in SC, or directly after Geraldine Ferraro's comment.

I wish she could have done so -- would have tempered a lot of damaging narratives for her campaign.

Ezra Klein reader Paula wonders how things would have been if Hillary had been able to make a similar kind of speech on gender:

Quote:

Ezra Klein reader Paula wonders how things would have been if Hillary had been able to make a similar kind of speech on gender:

Well, that's really quite a thought, isn't it?

I'd theorize that she didn't because she doesn't think that way. And I'd further speculate that this is because of a generational difference and that there are significant differences between these two issues but even moreso because Obama really is quite a special fellow.

My first thought was that she had seen it but wanted to downplay its significance by denying it. I think I've seen your uncharitableness and raised you.

I don't think she's capable of making an inspirational speech of that type.

Cycloptichorn

Reading last Sunday's Outlook section, I found myself under attack from word one. Before I had finished my morning coffee, I had read that I -- and millions like me -- were stupid, fickle, elitist and hard-hearted.

Charotte Allen, in her now-infamous essay, argued that she and I and all others of our sex were naturally inferior to men. Linda Hirshman, in an essay that ran beside Allen's under the shared headline "Women v. Women," condemned me and all other feminists and college-educated women who voted for Barack Obama as being callous and capricious. While the Allen essay understandably grabbed the lioness's share of the attention, the Hirshman piece is by far the more damaging of the two.

However outrageous Allen's claims, they're pretty easily put into perspective by a glance at Allen's record as a right-wing opponent of all things feminist. Hirshman, however, makes her claims as a feminist, and then tars fellow feminists -- those who vote differently than her -- with the right's "liberal elitist" brush. For flourish, she uses the sexist technique of ridiculing two women prominent in the Obama campaign by focusing only on their physical attributes. (Maria Shriver is reduced to a description of her hair, while Michelle Obama is mentioned in the context of her fashionable shoes.)

Feminists who support Obama, Hirshman writes, care little for the working-class woman. Their votes reflect nothing more than a "turn to solidarity with their own class." The same goes for college-educated women of all stripes who support Obama, all of whom are presumed, in Hirshman's argument, to be well-off, be they social workers or administrative assistants. If we cared for the working-class woman, she says, we would vote for Hillary Rodham Clinton because she was the first of the two to offer a paid family leave proposal and proposes a "slightly more generous" health plan than does Obama. If we vote on the basis of, say, something as esoteric as foreign policy, we're being elitist, because presumably everybody knows that foreign policy has no bearing on the life of the working-class woman.

I don't know who Hirshman thinks is fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But to dismiss Obama's stance against the war (and Clinton's vote to authorize President Bush's foray in to Iraq) as merely the high-minded concerns of narcissistic elites is perhaps not the best way to express solidarity with the class from which many of those fighting the war are drawn. It also smacks of the implication that foreign policy is too complicated a subject for the working-class woman to understand.

The notion that not rewarding Clinton for being "first" with a paid family-leave proposal somehow hurts working-class women is just silly, given Obama's own proposal. As for the "slightly more generous" health care plan proposed by Clinton, it works via a mandate that is legitimate fodder for debate, especially among the working-class people who would most feel the sting of the stick in this carrot-and-stick approach.

Her assertion that women who vote for Obama vote against their own economic self-interest essentially holds no water.

The feminist rationale for an Obama vote is really quite simple: My grand-niece. Your daughter, if you have one. All the little girls who are growing up at a rather grim hour in American history.

<snipped>

Anybody else notice the perverted press's hard on today and yesterday about the first lady schedules? It's sickening to me. One headline basically implied that she was in the room while Bill was getting it on with Monica.

I think I really am about sick of this election season.

Candidate Watch

Hillary's Balkan Adventures, Part II


Greeting ceremony, Tuzla military airport, Bosnia, March 25, 1996.

[i]"I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base."[/i]

--Hillary Clinton, speech at George Washington University, March 17, 2008.

Hillary Clinton has been regaling supporters on the campaign trail with hair-raising tales of a trip she made to Bosnia in March 1996. In her retelling, she was sent to places that her husband, President Clinton, could not go because they were "too dangerous." When her account was challenged by one of her traveling companions, the comedian Sinbad, she upped the ante and injected even more drama into the story. In a speech earlier this week, she talked about "landing under sniper fire" and running for safety with "our heads down."

There are numerous problems with Clinton's version of events.

The Facts

As a reporter who visited Bosnia soon after the December 1995 Dayton Peace agreement, I can attest that the physical risks were minimal during this period, particularly at a heavily fortified U.S. Air Force base, such as Tuzla. Contrary to the claims of Hillary Clinton and former Army secretary Togo West, Bosnia was not "too dangerous" a place for President Clinton to visit in early 1996. In fact, the first Clinton to visit the Tuzla Air Force base was not Hillary, but Bill, on January 13, 1996.

Had Hillary Clinton's plane come "under sniper fire" in March 1996, we would certainly have heard about it long before now. Numerous reporters, including the Washington Post's John Pomfret, covered her trip. A review of nearly 100 news accounts of her visit shows that not a single newspaper or television station reported any security threat to the First Lady. "As a former AP wire service hack, I can safely say that it would have been in my lead had anything like that happened," said Pomfret.

According to Pomfret, the Tuzla airport was "one of the safest places in Bosnia" in March 1996, and "firmly under the control" of the 1st Armored Division.

Far from running to an airport building with their heads down, Clinton and her party were greeted on the tarmac by smiling U.S. and Bosnian officials. An eight-year-old Moslem girl, Emina Bicakcic, read a poem in English. An Associated Press photograph of the greeting ceremony, above, shows a smiling Clinton bending down to receive a kiss.

"There is peace now," Emina told Clinton, according to Pomfret's report in the Washington Post the following day, "because Mr. Clinton signed it. All this peace. I love it."

The First Lady's schedule, released on Wednesday and available here, confirms that she arrived in Tuzla at 8.45 a.m. and was greeted by various dignitaries, including Emina Bicakcic, (whose name has mysteriously been redacted from the document.)

You can see CBS News footage of the arrival ceremony here. The footage shows Clinton walking calmly out of the back of the C-17 military transport plane that brought her from Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany.

Among the U.S. officials on hand to greet Clinton at the airport was Maj. Gen. William Nash, the commander of U.S. troops in Bosnia. Nash told me that he was unaware of any security threat to Clinton during her eight-hour stay in Tuzla. He said, however, that Clinton had a "busy schedule" and may have got the impression that she was being hurried on her way.

According to Sinbad, who provided entertainment on the trip along with the singer Sheryl Crow, the "scariest" part was deciding where to eat. As he told Mary Ann Akers of The Post, "I think the only 'red-phone' moment was: 'Do we eat here or at the next place.'" Sinbad questioned the premise behind the Clinton version of events. "What kind of president would say 'Hey man, I can't go 'cause I might get shot so I'm going to send my wife. Oh, and take a guitar player and a comedian with you."

Replying to Sinbad earlier this week, Clinton dismissed him as "a comedian." Her campaign referred me to Togo West, who was also on the trip and is a staunch Hillary supporter. West could not remember "sniper fire" himself, but said there was no reason to doubt the First Lady's version of events. "Everybody's perceptions are different," he told me.

Clinton made no mention of "sniper fire" in her autobiography "Living History," published in 2003, although she did say there were "reports of snipers" in the hills around the airport.

UPDATE Friday 6:45 p.m.

Lissa Muscatine, who served as Hilary Clinton's chief speechwriter in 1996 and accompanied her on the Bosnia trip, feels that I have failed to provide a full picture of what took place. She gave me her "vivid recollections" of the arrival in Tuzla, which I quote below:

I was on the plane with then First Lady Hillary Clinton for the trip from Germany into Bosnia in 1996. We were put on a C17-- a plane capable of steep ascents and descents -- precisely because we were flying into what was considered a combat zone. We were issued flak jackets for the final leg because of possible sniper fire near Tuzla. As an additional precaution, the First Lady and Chelsea were moved to the armored cockpit for the descent into Tuzla. We were told that a welcoming ceremony on the tarmac might be canceled because of sniper fire in the hills surrounding the air strip. From Tuzla, Hillary flew to two outposts in Bosnia with gunships escorting her helicopter.

Anybody else with first-hand memories of Clinton's Tuzla trip, please send them along.

The Pinocchio Test

Clinton's tale of landing at Tuzla airport "under sniper fire" and then running for cover is simply not credible. Photographs and video of the arrival ceremony, combined with contemporaneous news reports, tell a very different story. Four Pinocchios.

about the first lady schedules

or Miller or Maporche raining scorn upon their fellow Liberals

Short of a revelation that Obama is an al-Qaida operative and Hillary is a bull-dyke dominatrix, we couldn't have a more perfect Democratic primary contest.

It's probably inelegant, but I can't help myself from reveling in the schadenfreude resulting from the schism the Obama/Clinton thing has caused among A2K Liberals.

Every time I read Roxxy blasting some former ally for their slavish love of The Monster Hillary, or Cyclo superciliously chastising a Clintonista for their blindness for The Light, I rub my hands together in glee.

Every time I read Bipo blasting some Obamaniac for their supercilious chastisement of Clintonistas, or Miller or Maporche raining scorn upon their fellow Liberals --- who happen to hate Hillary, I experience this warm sensation in my mid-section.

Short of a revelation that Obama is an al-Qaida operative and Hillary is a bull-dyke dominatrix, we couldn't have a more perfect Democratic primary contest.

Your mindless sniping makes you irrelevant.