Frank Rich: SniperFib reveals HRC's guilt over Iraq and her campaign's cluelessness about the Web

[BeyondGeography]

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?

...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.”

...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...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/30/opinion/30rich.html?ref=opinion

[DJ13]

1. the Clinton campaign’s cluelessness about the Web has been apparent from the start

"You mean I have to be HONEST because everyone is watching me?!"

:eyes:

[Cha]

13. And it will be the most watched LIES

on youtube? :+ Even more than that Pastor Wright that I work so hard to keep on m$$$m? :silly:

[AllentownJake]

2. Running a campaign like its 1996

That's her problem in a nutshell.

[BumRushDaShow]

5. You just reminded me about her buying that hour on the Hallmark Channel.

Bill Clinton utilized cable (most notably MTV) to get his message out and campaign in the '90s and she inturn went right for that outlet and basically ignored the web. You would think Chelsea would have been well aware... But I guess "mom" is hard-headed. :rofl:

[dkf]

7. Who watches the Hallmark channel anyway?

What a waste of $.

And she wants to manage the finances of the country? Forget it!

[Cha]

15. One very unsavvy move

among tons.

[AllentownJake]

17. The books that will be written

by her advisers right after this is over ripping the strategy, each other, and her to shred will be required reading in Political Science for colleges for years.

[BumRushDaShow]

19. It supposedly targets a female/family demographic.

But the channel has limited distribution and viewership and I expect for infomercial purposes, it was the "cheapest" she could find with the widest audience for cable. Of course the internet is about as "free" (as in beer) as it gets if you utilize YouTube or other venues!

Heck, there are a myriad of streaming internet radio stations out there that one could be on that could go viral just by people posting a link and spreading it when the candidate is on. The archives alone of such broadcasts are really what has helped to keep the 'net relevant and allows people to go back and see or hear something they missed (where traditional broadcasts would rarely repeat). Who needs the networks and the talking heads?

The more I see how the 'net is empowering "people", the more I fear they are going to try to shut it down.

[Drunken Irishman]

29. Most who watched her town hall were already supporting her.

It was a stupid move, since she pumped all this money into essentially a town hall nationally where only those who were going to vote for her watched it. Talk about preaching the choir on that one.

[sudopod]

34. What you said!

Also, I suspect that candidates like Dennis will have much better chances 10-15 years from now. The internet is only beginning to flex its muscles. By that time, it will be impossible for the networks and newspapers to shut out candidates like they did to him. Candidates will be able to go directly to the people.

[dmr]

37. Yup, and it's very important to protect the net

by keeping it out of the hands of corporations and the government spys, too.

The media was once the watchdog, in trying to keep our government honest and effective. The media has failed America. If it weren't for the net, America and the Constitution would have been gutted by now, or close to it.

[NDambi]

45. Amen

[FatDave]

41. If they shut down the net...

we'll build another one. A better one. More distributed. Independent of government. Fully anonymous.

[Lucky 13]

36. Her target demographic. Women 50+.

[Demeter]

48. Well She Completely Missed This One

I'm going for Obama (since I'm in Michigan, nobody cares what I think, anyway.)

[Kahuna]

42. Old people watch Hallmark. She already has that vote.

:shrug:

[jdadd]

59. My 93 year old mother.....

She would be pissed if Hillary pre empted Barnaby Jones:rofl:

PS...Moms an Obama fan :thumbsup:

[goclark]

64. My mom is 89

and when she sees HC on the tv screen she hollers,

"*, get off my television!"

That is coming from a lady that never curses.

[truedelphi]

50. The production values of that Hallmark program were appalling

I watched several minutes of it during the commercial breaks to a movie I was really watching.

It was an embarrassment. All these overly wide-eyed, overly worshipful people shivering in delight at their chance to ask Sen Clinton if she wasn't the most amazing person on earth.

Ninety two seconds into it, I was nauseous.

What can you say abt it if watching commercials is preferable to watching the show itself?

[Stephanie]

57. I honestly think the inspiration for that was Live Earth

Remember all the bizarre remotes by Bill & Chelsea from different rallies in other cities? The whole thing was such a huge EMBARRASSMENT. I think this is the most inept campaign in history. They have SQUANDERED their cash, their lead, their goodwill.

[depakid]

8. Agreed

As usual, Rich makes astute and salient points:

"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."

[Cha]

14. Have they been hiding in a

bunker for the last 12 years? Like they couldn't afford to hire the very best 21 century guy instead they went with the knee capper.

[AllentownJake]

16. No

They didn't have to run much of a campaign in 2000 to get her senate seat. NY was handed to her

Obama didn't really face a general election challenger but he had a tough primary fight. He learned there.

[Cha]

25. Right, and they thought it would be all over

on SuperTues even though she came in 3rd in Iowa. Obama's also learned about community organizing which was invaluble experience going into different cities and towns across our vast land:)

[AllentownJake]

26. On a highly positive note

If we think they are bad at this. Get off my lawn McCain has got to be clueless. Running around on a press bus and saying "my friends" over and over again is going to get old...around June.

[NOLALady]

62. Maybe

they went for the knee capper because it worked, previously.

Not this time!

[BumRushDaShow]

3. Wow.

Didn't realize how viral that Bosniagate video went. After all the Wright-bashing, for this latest to swamp the net... this really makes the broadcast news outlets look like idiots.

[The Wizard]

55. What do you mean look like idiots?

They refuse to understand that they're on the fast track to dinosaur land. The Clinton's are the last vestige of the old political model of raising corporate cash for TV ads. The remote control and the Internet have relegated them to second tier standing. Everyday more people turn from the TV to the Internet for political information. The YouTube phenomena and the Internet's ability to spread information to more places and with great speed has made politicians more honest. They can discount the new technology and political landscape at their own risk. Things ain't what they used to be.

[grantcart]

4. last sentence says it all

Last week Mrs. Clinton learned the hard way that Iraq, racial gamesmanship and viral video can destroy a Democrat, too.

[ClayZ]

6. What a journalist he is! K and R

[moc]

9. "the political perils of 20th-century analog arrogance in a digital age"

Great line!

:rofl:

[Cha]

10. Good for Rich...

pointing out the obvious arrogance of hilary & the toads.

"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".

[LiberalAndProud]

11. That article was worth clicking to read. Thanks.

[Skwmom]

12. A misvote? You mean the vote to further her career b/c she didn't

want to look weak on national defense?

Clinton lied so outrageously b/c she's always been able to LIE big and get away with it.

[Cha]

20. That was a thought I

had, too, about this whole "I was under Fire by Snipers in Bosnia scenario". hilary has gotten away with so much for so long that, "what's one more big whopper if it gets me some votes"?

[BattyDem]

18. Around Super-Tuesday, I remember ...

hearing someone say that Clinton was running a 20th Century campaign. In other words, a pre-internet campaign. They said she just couldn't get a handle on the whole blogger/YouTube/rapid response thing where ordinary citizens could have a major voice and other candidates could counter the attacks quickly and inexpensively. I didn't think that was entirely true ... but the whole Bosnia thing makes me wonder. Did they really believe no one would ever see the video?

(Sorry ... I can't remember who said it. I think it was during a discussion on MSNBC.)

[ginnyinWI]

21. Obama is running a 2008 campaign

and that's one reason he's ahead. He's picked up where Dean and Kerry left off last time using the internet and his great website. His campaign advisers don't miss a beat keeping on top of their message and responding quickly to every attack thrown their way.

[RamboLiberal]

22. Rich also makes important point race myth is busted

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.

[FrenchieCat]

23. Whoa! The entire Article is phenomenal......

:thumbsup:

[City Lights]

24. Great title. Great read. Thanks.

Frank Rich is always a pleasure to read. :-)

[Voice for Peace]

27. About the role of YouTube, as he mentions..

I hadn't realized that George Allen's 'macaca' problem happened because of YouTube.. but of course!

So it is occurring to me what a boon YouTube is for bringing back honesty into our world. Although people can make and post deceptive videos, of course, it goes the other way. It is becoming harder for people to get away with stuff. YAY on that.

Frank Rich's column is always pretty great in my opinion.

[Kahuna]

43. You tube is making it more impossible for the M$M to ignore important

stories. It's making it harder for the MSM to spin their stories. They still do it. But when they do they are quickly countered on youtube and are exposed. There is subtle change in the way the media is forced to cover news. They are being forced to be more honest about it. This is what will ultimately destroy FAUX news. The handwriting is on the wall.

[merh]

28. somebody posted a youtube video of one of

Hillary's "hip" campaign ad, it reminded me of those dance groups that used to perform at the superbowl, like "lift up America" - it was so outdated.

[Kahuna]

44. That ABC thing? It was awful. Truly pathetic. nt

[DrFunkenstein]

30. Jessica Lynch Had The Courage to Admit The Story Was False

Hillary Clinton had the courage to blame "sleep deprivation" for allowing the sniper story to make its way past her speech scrubbers on several occasions.

I'm sure her fact checkers didn't even notice the Senator's story about being pinned down by enemy fire.

[anonymous171]

31. Snipergate reminded everyone about the Clintons' relationship with truth.

"I did not have sexual relations with that woman" was obviously brought to mind.

I love Bill and the Clintons but their time is up.

[nsd]

32. An excellent column. K & R. /nt

[Drunken Irishman]

33. I don't think the Clintons get the 21st Century media.

They're still stuck in an era where lies can take months to get reported. When they last ran a national campaign, the internet was still not at the level it is today and cable news -- while growing -- did not nearly have the impact. So I think Hillary believed she could get away with this lie. Telling a group of people something in 1996 is not going to make many ripples, so you can get away with a bit of embellishing -- notice she never did it in the debates. But in today's media, what you say can be uploaded to YouTube within minutes, broadcast on CNN, MSNBC and FOX in a matter of an hour and your lie can blow up from there. That's what she is facing and if she had actually been the frontrunner in this race, it probably would've killed her chances.

[Tarheel_Dem]

35. K&R...because I agree with every syllable.

:kick:

[Johnny__Motown]

38. K&R

[fujiyama]

39. Some great points all around

Hillary ultimately has no excuse for her poor performance. It's amazing her supporters just can't understand that. She blew it. She had all the advantages in the world going into this - name recognition, fund raising, and she was generally liked within the party.

Instead she first allowed Iowa to slip by. Fine. No big deal. She picked up NH. But she should have learned immediately after. Especially regarding the ability to raise lots of money from many donors - that she never understood.

YouTube and its videos are now ubiquitous with the web, especially since it was purchased by Google. If a person searches for a video, a link to the video will pop up - either through YouTube or even Google Video or ANY blog or news site.

I think Hillary, like many others dismissed "netroots" as an odd '04 phenomenon with Dean. Since they saw Dean's campaign collapse, they figured the same thing might happen with Obama. Even I was skeptical if he could pull it off, but Iowa showed he could get beyond a base of "latte sipping liberals". Plus, the difference now is that more people get news online than in the past - even compared to four years ago. In some ways this pushes many of us to simply get out news only from sources we agree with, thus reinforcing our own convictions or confirming various doubts we had.

People were already suspicious about Hillary and Bill's ability to tell the truth. When she lies, especially in such a blatant manner, those same people on the fence probably saw the video and realized how ridiculous it was.

Personally, I didn't jump to a conclusion right away. I was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. Maybe she was just confusing different trips to the region? After all, I'm sure she made a few out there, as it was a troubled area of the globe through much of Clinton's time in office. But then again, why would a first lady and daughter be in such a dangerous area in the first place? And wouldn't such a harrowing escape by the first lady have been MAJOR headlines in the '90s? I'm sure many would remember such an event.

As Rich said, politicians lie, but as I've seen, if you're going to lie, at least make it believable dammit. Don't insult people's intelligence or their memories. Especially since Nixon, politicians should have realized that everything is recorded (even if they didn't necessarily do it). Her statement was so ridiculous. It's the equivalent of saying you have a PhD from Harvard, when in reality you have an associates degree with a local Massachusetts community college.

[Hope And Change]

40. K&R!

:kick:

[WillyT]

46. K & R !!!

:kick:



:rofl:

[Scurrilous]

47. Great article.

:thumbsup:

[nichomachus]

49. The power of YouTube

Quite a few months ago, I was poking around YouTube and I came across a piece by a 15-year-old kid. Just him in front of his computer in his bedroom, doing a five-minute rant on censorship and how the government was a threat to your freedom, etc. I noticed that it had been watched something like 300,000 times in just a few weeks.

I was blown away when I thought about how much politicians would give to reach that kind of a targeted audience with absolutely zero investment. I'm an old fart, but I'm Internet savvy. Even so, I was amazed at the viral nature of this. Even I watched it all the way through.

A few days later, I was with a group of other old-fart friends, and told them that YouTube and online viral activity would have an influence on this election that none of the dinosaurs who run our national elections really understood. They looked at me as if I was speaking Swahili, but I only took that as an endorsement of my view, since my friends probably follow pretty closely the demographic of the consultants and "experts" who run the corporate campaigns.

[Major Hogwash]

51. Her Bosnia stories kept getting more fictional the more she told them.

This must end her campaign.
This must end now.

She will not get the military vote in the fall if she is the nominee.
Military families will run to vote for McCain if she is the nominee.

[kentj44]

52. what do you expect from nurse

ratchett?

[mcollier]

56. Vote on

Let's have all the voters vote in each of the remaining primaries... Its good to see how the public interest is growing on the democratic side... The media is making the "Fight" There is no real fight between Barack and Hillary... The media takes a few staments said by the candidates or their supporters and runs with it for weeks. This is an attempt for the media to not focus on the troubling issues this country is facing as a result of the past 8 years of failure under the Bush Admin and Republican ruled congress.

There is a clever effort on the part of the media to portray John McCain as someone other that a continuation of Bush and republican failed policies...

What will it take for the American People to grasp the magnitude of which the most of the republicans in office these past 8 years have such little regard for everyday Americans. If you were paying attention to how they were voting in congress you would know....

Examples: Eliminating overtime pay, voted against increase in minimum wage, voted for the war, voted against oversight of the war, voted against childrens health insurance increases, voted for tax breaks to the wealth, voted against increace in Iraq veteran salary and bonus increases, voted to extend Iraq troop deployments from 12 months to 15 months; And the list goes on and on and on.... Check out C-Span or C-Span.org to get the real story....

[AntiFascist]

53. The Sniper Fib is also indicative of something else...

how she might run her presidency: by repeatedly lying to her base. Those of us who have researched the Clinton background in too much detail know that they may have gotten to their respective positions by cooperating with the darker forces running in the shadows of our government, and in the darkest corners of the Republican Party. This is like a massive iceberg whose peak is just now revealing itself in the Bush presidency, and which threatens the Titanic which has become of our nation. Do we simply rearrange the deck chairs playing the same old songs, or do we try something different that might save us all from drowning as the elite scramble about in their own greed?

[uponit7771]

54. Hillary is showing how disconnected she is from gen-x voters

[ekwhite]

58. Another brilliant analysis by Frank Rich

He is, along with Paul Krugman, one of the best columnists working today.

[BlooInBloo]

60. Make that 71,675, 765 ppl that don't matter to Clinton.

[indimuse]

61. From ann Outsider...Looking..in///

YOU!! ARE an asss

[Submariner]

63. The truth is a wonderful thing

It's sad that the Hillbots are willing to overlook her lies. Her lies are a slap in the face to veterans who have truly been in harm's way.