Clinton: Bosnia is back...
Posted: Friday, April 11, 2008 9:20 AM by Mark Murray
During campaign stops yesterday in the small Indiana towns of Jasper and Boonville, NBC/NJ’s Mike Memoli reports, Bill Clinton went out of his way to stick up for his wife in the flap over her trip to Bosnia in 1996. Clinton had told the audiences that his wife “misstated” the circumstances of the trip just once, chalking it up to exhaustion. But even the Clinton campaign has acknowledged that Hillary erred multiple times in describing a situation in Tuzla. Each time that Clinton brought up Bosnia, he tweaked the press for overreacting to Hillary’s indiscretion. But raising the issue himself after the story had begun to fade only served to keep it alive again. And that makes more noteworthy the fact that Matt McKenna, who has served as Clinton’s press secretary since late 2007, has not been on the trail with the president for over a week, leaving him and traveling press without a day-to-day wrangler.
VIDEO: Just when the flap over Hillary Clinton’s sniper fire comment had died down, her husband brings it back up – and appeared to exaggerate, too. NBC’s Chris Matthews reports.More from Memoli reporting on Clinton from his second stop last night: "This is a big deal to her,” Clinton said. “Some of you may have seen that she took a terrible beating in the press for a few days because, she was exhausted at 11 o'clock at night and she started talking about Bosnia and she misstated the circumstances under which she landed in Bosnia. Did you all see all that?”
"And oh they acted like she was practically Mata Hari, you know? Just making up all this stuff. And then the President of Bosnia said, 'Well, it was quite dangerous when she came. There were snipers in the hills around.' And then general Wes Clark, who was there trying to make the peace among the Bosnians, said, 'Yeah it was really dangerous. Let me remind you three of the Americans who were on my peace-keeping team were killed because they had to take a dangerous road 'cause they couldn't go the regular way.' And she had to go up into the cockpit with our daughter, in a bulletproof area, and all the other people had to sit on their bulletproof flack jackets because it was dangerous.”
"So she immediately said, 'OK, I misremembered that, they didn't cancel the welcoming ceremony, but it was pretty dangerous.' She was there cause she cared about the troops."
On cue, the Boston Globe today has a piece about the effect of Bill Clinton on Hillary’s candidacy. "It is one of the central challenges of Hillary Clinton's campaign: How to take credit for the accomplishments of her husband's presidency and profit from his popularity while distancing herself from his past and present positions on which they disagree. The balancing act came into sharper relief this week as she took contrasting positions from Bill Clinton by opposing the Colombia trade deal and favoring a boycott of the Olympic opening ceremonies."
The New York Times front-pages another Bill Clinton accomplishment that has received some criticism from the left: welfare reform.
After Elton John cited misogyny as having a role in the Democratic primary race, Clinton was asked about it. “Clinton, asked Thursday if she agreed with the notion that anti-women sentiment impedes her battle against Obama, replied: ‘I don't know how I'd assess what role it's playing. I mean, look, you can't ignore the fact that gender and race are embodied in our two candidacies. We are who we are. And that produces reactions of all kinds in people. But at the end of the day, people have to decide who would be the best president.’”
In Pittsburgh yesterday, Clinton hit Obama on his latest oil ad, NBC/NJ’s Athena Jones notes. “I know that my opponent’s been running an ad recent across Pennsylvania very forcefully saying that he doesn’t take money from oil companies. Nobody takes money from oil companies. It’s illegal to take money from oil companies. It’s been illegal for 100 years and in fact, he takes money from oil company executives, but more than that, we both had a chance in 2005 to stand up and be counted. Not just what we say when we’re on the campaign trail, but how we act when it matters. And we had a chance to vote Yes or No on Dick Cheney’s energy bill, which gave billions more in tax breaks to the oil companies. I voted No; he voted Yes and we’re going to take that message across Pennsylvania. If you want somebody who’s strong enough to take on the special interests and mean what I say, and deliver results, I’m your candidate.”
