Across the pond

The Clinton campaign upped the ante in the US Presidential campaign yesterday. According to both the Washington Post and the New York Times, Clinton aides attacked the Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, for urging the super delegates to vote for the candidate who won a majority of the pledged delegates.

The NYT tops its article with the picture above, which reminded me of one of the many paradoxes of this campaign. Polosi last year became the first ever woman to become the Speaker which was a tonic to all those who feared that the US was not ready to elect a woman to the highest office in the land. Because the majorrity who voted for her knew, that not only were they voting for a new Speaker, but they were voting for the person who would immediately become the President, if George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were assassinated.

Pelosi did not urge people to vote for Obama. Since she became Speaker she has accepted the constitutional responsibilies which the job entails. So, although a Democrat, she has not used her powerful position to torpedo the legislation Bush has been introducing, much to the disappontment of many of her fellow Democrats.

 Neither has she used her position to support throw her weight behind a particular candidate for the next President. So why has she now spoken out for Obama?

Well, actually she hasn’t. If you read the New York Times and the Washington Post in full, you discover that the Clinton aides were attacking Pelosi for remarks made in an interview with ABC television news ten days ago, which did not attract much attention. Because Pelosi, in answering questions, was saying what many others have been saying that the will of the voters should not be overturned.

Assessing the will of the voters is quite a complex question, not easily dealt with in sound bites. The votes for the pledged delegates in the primaries and the causcases are showing a majority for Obama, and most insiders believe that when the final vote is counted Obama will have a majority. But whether it will be a commanding lead is still far from certain. And some of the pledged voters are able to alter their votes at a later stage.

So the reason the Clinton campaign hit at Pelosi yesterday probably had more to do with the need for them to take back the initiative after the Gallop Poll showing Obama leading and the withdrawal Hillary Clinton had to make yesterday about her claim to have landed in Bosnia under sniper fire in 1996. She had to make the withdrawal because someone at CBS News had dredged up from their archives the film of the landing, which showed it to be trouble free.

Today’s Washington Post carries a story which reports that in the previous year a Congressional delegation did land there under sniper fire and that the report of that event sounded quite like Hillary’s account of her own experience. As the Post writes laconically, the event did happen, but not to Hillary.

How this kind of story plays with the US electorate is a matter for conjecture. The Washington Post does not editorialise. But my own view is that Hillary’s claim that she landed under sniper fire was the kind of lie, which in my experience every human being tells about events long ago. We remember the past imperfectly and facts of what actually happened get mixed up with feelings as well as thoughts.

It seems entirely likely that Hillary feared for her life and as the plane came into land was remembering the experience of the Congressinal delegation the year before. Even if she had not read the report, she knew the risk she was taking flying into a war torn region. So there is no doubting her courage. Her claim is now exposed as a lie. But probably not a deliberate lie. More a memory trick in recalling what for her was a moment of great stress.