Penn Pals

After several weeks of Sen. Barack Obama, Democrat of Illinois, serving as a punching bag in the imbroglio over the statements of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the punches have begun to fly in another direction.

This time they are landing on Sen. Hillary Clinton, the chief opponent of Sen. Barack for the Democratic presidential nomination.

If you follow the American presidential race, you'll note that the two are involved in a titanic struggle to be the Democratic Party's standard-bearer against Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the Republican Party's presumptive nominee.

The latest turn in their ongoing struggle came in response to remarks made by Senator Clinton last winter. In those remarks, she recalled a trip to Bosnia she made in 1996 when she was First Lady. Senator Clinton said that when she landed, she had to run from her plane and that there was sniper fire on the tarmac. She was contradicted by one of the participants in the trip, the comedian Sinbad, and an Obama supporter. His comments were attacked as partisan.

Then like the deus ex machina of the Greek classic plays, enter YouTube. YouTube has become an American Oracle at Delphi issuing digital declarations that can lead candidates to reward or ruin. Videos of Senator Clinton's landing in Bosnia in 1996 showed a far different scene than she implied. She didn't run from the plane, there was no sniper fire, and she warmly greeted a child upon deplaning. A report aired on American network news and the pile-on began.

Senator Clinton said she "misspoke" and the incident "proves I'm human." What it did do was throw a roadblock in her campaign against Senator Obama in the state of Pennsylvania that holds a critical primary on April 22. While Senator Obama's campaign was trying to recover from the pummeling he has taken over the Jeremiah Wright affair (see the previous posts), along came this incident to focus the self-righteous ire of the press in Senator Clinton's direction.

Not that other candidates don't embellish or exaggerate. Longtime presidential watchers recall some of the claims made by Vice President Al Gore in the 2000 campaign (he "invented" the internet; he and his wife Tipper were the inspiration for the couple in the film Love Story based on the novel by Erich Segal; as a young child, he recalled hearing a song about labor unions [Look for the Union Label] which hadn't been written when he claimed he heard it); Senator Obama, according to the New York Times, claimed his parents fell in love during the great civil rights march in Selma, Alabama in 1965, although he actually was born four years earlier. Some of the fond recollections of President Ronald Reagan were often found to be based on myth than reality (like the story he told about the World War Two tail gunner who died in a crash landing because he was too wounded to crawl out of his combat space; the genesis was traced to Hollywood movies not a verifiable incident).

And so on and so on.

But one of the weaknesses of the Clinton campaign, according to polling data, is that Americans believe both she and her husband are, how to put this, factually-challenged, and are willing to parse words and phrases to obfuscate meaning and attempt to be on both sides of an issue at once. The most glaring example came in the October 31, 2007, Democratic presidential debate when Senator Clinton did not give a yes-or-no answer on whether or not she supported then-New York Governor Eliot Spitzer's plan to issue driver's licenses to illegal immigrants.

Pressed and pressed, she refused to provide a thumbs up or down and continued in this vein for several days until she finally declared in the negative. But by then, the damage was done and her image reinforced. I always peg that as the time when Senator Obama's campaign began to make headway against the then "inevitable" candidacy of the former First Lady.

At a time when she began to make headway against Senator Obama, voters are reminded once again about one of the characteristics they don't like about her instead of some of the ones they do.

Nevertheless, current polling puts her at least 10 points up in Pennsylvania and political commentators there suggest she may be stronger than that. She needs a double digit win in the Keystone State to keep her candidacy going and win in high double digits (15-20 points) could really disturb the sleep cycles of Democratic Party superdelegates who will likely be called on to supply the winning votes for one of the two Democratic protagonists.

I'll try and post again tonight about some interesting developments in Pennsylvania including a registration drive by Republicans to vote in the Democratic Primary for Senator Clinton…to keep the contest going to the advantage of Senator McCain.

Also, I'll have the latest on polls and other things. See ya later.