Posers
- 03.25.2008 - 12:14 PMAbe: Hillary Clinton is taking a beating in the media over her fabricated recollection–a detailed one at that–of her visit to Bosnia. No gunfire and no running down the tarmac, according to the video. Commentators are surprised by the level of specificity in the Clinton tale. But the Clintons are, after all, accomplished “embellishers,” and it should come as no surprise that reality does not match her tales of grandeur.
But she is not the only one exaggerating or misleading voters as to her past. This report reminds us that Barack Obama talks a good game of reconciliation, bridge-building, and innovative policy, but has no record of accomplishment:
His three-year record in the Senate, however, offers little evidence that he can do what he’s promising. His party was in the minority for his first two years, and in the third he began campaigning for president and missed lots of time on Capitol Hill. He was absent from or only partly involved in some key bipartisan efforts to head off stalemates on judicial nominations, immigration and Iraq war policy.
This, in part, may explain why voters (as opposed to media cheerleaders) have yet to crown a definitive winner in the Democratic primary race. In a contest in which “authenticity” was supposed to be at a premium, we have two Democratic contenders who are thin on accomplishments and long on storytelling. Given that, it is understandably not an easy choice for Democratic voters.
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March 25th, 2008 at 8:20 PM
Hillary said she exited a plane under sniper fire and ran, with her daughter, with her head down. Ms. Rubin sees this as an “exaggeration?”
Obama over-states accomplishments in Congress and Clinton claims to have run, ducking, from sniper fire: anyone who sees this as an instance of “both sides exaggerating” is spending too much time at the office. One really sinister effect of extended campaigns, I think, in which the campaigners and the campaign reporters spend so much time listening to each other is that they both lose their ability to distinguish between rhetorical embellishment and outright, take-your-breath-away, lies like running — with your only child — from sniper fire.
Posts like this (”both sides of this political contest are exaggerating” or the follow-on insight that competing exaggerations make it hard for the public to choose one side or the other as the party of truth), rather that contributing to some new understanding of the campaigns, may actually contribute to the public’s concern that the media covering the campaigns are as tone-deaf as the campaigners.