A dozen years ago, New York Times columnist William Safire observed that “Americans of all political persuasions are coming to the sad realization that our First Lady — a woman of undoubted talents who was a role model for many in her generation — is a congenital liar.”
The first lady was Hillary Rodham Clinton. Safire went on to list several scandals of the day that will remain mostly forgotten unless she gets the Democratic nomination, and then they will be repeated around the clock on Fox News.
(Safire also wrote a language column for The New York Times, and so it surprised me that he used the word “congenital.” Its primary meaning is “existing at birth but not hereditary,” as with “a congenital heart defect.” No one is born a liar, for lying requires language, and we have none at birth.)
Clinton’s latest whopper is still fresh. It concerned a goodwill visit to Bosnia in 1996, of which she recently said, “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.”
She has recounted that adventure several times this campaign season, perhaps to burnish her commander-in-chief credentials. She and Sen. John McCain have come under under enemy fire, whereas Sen. Barack Obama has not, or something like that.
Then it was conclusively demonstrated with contemporary video recordings that there was no sniper fire at the airport, and that there was a leisurely greeting ceremony on the tarmac. Her response? She “misspoke” because she was “sleep-deprived.”
Was she groggy every time she told that tale this year? And how does her sleep-deprivation rationale fit with her assurances that she’s the candidate who’s ready to answer the red telephone if it rings at 3 a.m.?
When she was campaigning in Colorado before our Feb. 5 caucuses, Clinton mentioned “all these women in their 90s” who were born before women could vote but were now excited because a woman was a viable candidate.
The problem with this fabrication is that women have been voting for president and every other elected office in Colorado since 1893. Women got the vote in all states with the passage of the 20th Amendment in 1920, but women had already voted in many states: Wyoming since statehood in 1890, Arizona with statehood in 1912, etc.
So even though the Clinton campaign produced a 90-year-old woman for the cameras, was the candidate lying about the presence of Colorado women who remembered a time when women could not vote here (they’d have to be about 120 years old)? Was it bad staff work, when she could have localized her message with something like how glad she was to be in a place with such a progressive tradition on women’s rights?
Whatever the case — fabrication, ignorance or sloth — it does not speak well for her as a candidate. Granted, this may be no big deal, especially since we live in one of her “insignificant” states. But it’s certainly part of a pattern of falsification that extends from her claim that she was named after Sir Edmund Hillary to her explanations of her 2002 vote on Iraq.
As she says about her Bosnia misspeaking, “So I made a mistake. That happens. It proves I’m human, which, you know, for some people, is a revelation. This is really about what policy experience we have and who’s ready to be commander-in-chief. And I’m happy to put my experience up against Senator Obama’s anyday.”
So let us grant that she does have much more experience in lying from the White House, going all the way back to 1993, and ask ourselves if that’s the kind of experience we want.
Ed Quillen (ed@cozine.com) is a freelance writer, history buff, publisher of Colorado Central Magazine in Salida.
