Almost like the time I told my teacher that I was late for class because the police ticketed me for riding my bicycle at 100 kilometres per hour, Hillary Clinton landed in hot water this week when she was called out on a statement. The only difference is that Clinton is running for the Democratic presidential nomination while I was merely explaining tardiness in grade school-and mine was true.
Last week, Clinton stated that, when arriving in Bosnia in 1996 she and daughter Chelsea were forced to run off the tarmac with their heads down as snipers fired. Though an interesting story, it was exposed as a falsification by a TV station on Mon. Mar. 24, when they aired the footage of what actually took place. The tape depicted the two Clintons disembarking from the plane, waiving to the crowd, shaking hands with Bosnia’s acting president and then greeting an eight-year-old girl. The truth, it seems, was slightly different.
This little scandal is indicative of a monstrous ineptitude on the part of either Clinton, her campaign staff, or both. She is currently trailing Barack Obama in delegates for the Democratic nomination, so tossing such an easily avoidable scandal into the mix is just stupid. Clinton claims that she just misspoke, but this doesn’t seem likely. It would be pretty hard to “remember” a time where the snipers were after you and your daughter when it didn’t actually happen. Admittedly, psychologists do suggests that some reclaimed memories may in fact be fictional, but that would require some serious therapy.
All that said, this also points to a failure amongst the Clinton campaign to realize that in the YouTube era, the footage of what you did as first lady can easily wind up online.
The most distressing aspect of the ordeal is what it identifies as the focus of the American presidential race-grandiose posturing. The media has been quick to suggest that the rationale behind this miscarriage of an international adventure tale being unravelled was that it would give Clinton more credibility regarding foreign policy. That is, the tactic adopted to win foreign policy points with voters is a personal anecdote and not a strong foreign policy strategy. This demonstrates the people running the campaign have realized that voters don’t give a shit about what a person believes or stands for and what they might do in office, but only how tough they are.
The whole debacle of the American toughness competition is bad enough, but its capacity to damage is brought to a fever pitch by the wealth of media attention it receives. There are numerous news items on relatively inconsequential things to do with Clinton, Obama and McCain on a continual basis. Indeed, in an attempt to redirect the heat from her tale, Clinton tried to focus attention back on the fact that Obama was unwilling to disown his former pastor for some inflammatory comments he made, though he did denounce them. To be sure, a great amount of the attention they receive is important and substantive, but even more is utter horse shit feeding the popularity contest. This, then, pulls attention away from other banalities like the current president and his sidekicks madly scurrying to destroy all goodwill towards America before leaving office.
This focus upon nonsense is a big problem for voters. In order to understand what the issues are that need to be addressed in this coming election, Americans need to be hearing, seeing and reading about them. With the attention going to the fluttering little details of the campaign, though, substantive issues don’t get the coverage they require and the voters are left with much less knowledge base of just exactly what the next toughest man/woman in America will need to do once they’ve won the contest.
This is a sad recognition. The shining light of democracy in the world isn’t even democracy-lite, it’s democracy-Paris Hilton.