Bloggers have been on this story for a while, but now that there’s video, and it was a slow news day on the campaign trail, it appears the rest of the media is catching up. For the Clinton campaign, that isn’t good news.
As part of her argument that she has the best experience and instincts to deal with a sudden crisis as president, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton recently offered a vivid description of having to run across a tarmac to avoid sniper fire after landing in Bosnia as first lady in 1996.
Yet on Monday, Mrs. Clinton admitted that she “misspoke” about the episode — a concession that came after CBS News showed footage of her walking calmly across the tarmac with her daughter, Chelsea, and being greeted by dignitaries and a child.
The backpedaling was a rare instance of Mrs. Clinton’s acknowledging an error, and she did so on a sensitive issue: She has cited her “strength and experience” since the start of the presidential race, framing her 80 trips abroad as first lady as preparation for dealing with foreign affairs as president. That argument was behind her campaign’s “red phone” commercial, which cast her as best able to handle a crisis.
Yesterday afternoon, the campaign began walking Clinton’s story back, and a few hours later, pressed by the Philadelphia Daily News’ Will Bunch, the senator insisted she “misspoke” and events in the Balkans 12 years ago were not quite as dramatic as she’d indicated.
Like John McCain’s confusion about al Qaeda last week, the explanation looks a little more suspect given that Clinton did not just get the version of events wrong once — the NYT noted that Clinton “described the sniper fire in similar terms at least twice in recent weeks.” It’s easy to “misspeak” once, it’s harder to explain when one makes the same mistake on multiple occasions.
A Clinton foreign policy adviser conceded to the Times that the senator had been “too loose” with her words and that she risked looking as if “she was trying to pump up a somewhat risky situation into a very dangerous one.”
To be sure, we’ve all heard more consequential exaggerations from presidential candidates, but this one increasingly looks like it’s going to be a real headache for Clinton. Indeed, the closer one looks at this flap, the worse it gets.
Clinton insisted she “landed under sniper fire.” That didn’t actually happen. She said the greeting ceremony at the Tuzla airport was cancelled, but it wasn’t. She said she and those around her “just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base,” but this simply didn’t occur.
And to complicate matters, Josh Marshall noted that Clinton has repeatedly claimed that she was “the first, you know, high- profile American to go into Bosnia after the peace accords were signed because we wanted to show that the United States was 100 percent behind the agreement.” This, unfortunately, also appears to be false.
The Obama campaign couldn’t help but pile on.
In the statement, Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor said, “Senator Clinton said that a planned welcoming ceremony was cancelled because they needed to avoid sniper fire, but news footage shows that she was met by a small child who read her a poem. Contrary to the latest spin from the Clinton campaign, when you make a false claim that’s in your prepared remarks, it’s not misspeaking, it’s misleading, and it’s part of a troubling pattern of Senator Clinton inflating her foreign policy experience.”
Now, there’s some question about whether the mistake was actually part of the prepared remarks — the Clinton campaign insists it was not — but the point about “inflating” her foreign policy experience is a genuine problem. Clinton’s claims about playing key policy roles in conflicts in Northern Ireland, Kosovo, and Rwanda also appear to have been exaggerated, in some instances, quite a bit.
But it’s this Bosnia anecdote that’s likely to cause the most trouble, in large part because there’s a video of her talking about the danger she overcame, and another video showing very little danger at all. In the lull of the campaign — we’re still about a month before the Pennsylvania primary — and with reporters looking for something new to talk about, getting caught making a mistake like this one may prove to be a problem.
To reiterate a point I raised over the weekend, this is a classic unforced error. This may seem excessive, but without any exaggerations at all, Clinton already has more foreign policy experience than five of the last six presidents (including her husband). She simply doesn’t need to embellish at all — her background is already sufficient for a credible presidential campaign.
But it appears that Clinton did, in fact, get “too loose” with the details, and exaggerated one of the underpinnings of her entire candidacy. I don’t imagine this will prompt a Jeremiah Wright-like feeding frenzy, but it will be a distraction the Clinton campaign doesn’t need.