Squaring the Culture

“Schadenfreude” appears to be the newest “word snob” fetish (remember 2000, when it was “gravitas?”), and I’m on board today because there’s just no good English word for it. I’m enjoying watching the Democrats hack each other to death. If I were Catholic, I’d be confessing that to a priest.

After last week’s barrage at Barack over his 20-year association with his racist, hard-left pastor, this week we’re watching Hillary Clinton eat crow after getting caught badly inflating her experience of a visit to Bosnia. Michelle Malkin probably has the most complete collection of links about the matter, plus some pretty amusing photoshops immortalizing the whopper (start here and work your way back through the links).

Ms. Clinton has a lot to lose. This particular attack, which began as an anonymous YouTube clip that clearly demonstrates that she did not land under sniper fire in Bosnia (let’s guess it was posted by an Obama supporter) and was incorporated into a CBS report a few days later, attacks Clinton’s strongest point in a particularly Rovian fashion (Karl Rove favored turning opponents’ strengths into liabilities, rather than exploiting known weaknesses). Clinton polls most positively in an area where political advisors expected a woman candidate to poll weakly, namely, whether voters consider that she would be a strong leader (see here and here.) If this incident erodes the perception that her experience as First Lady constitutes genuine leadership experience and gets voters examining the rest of her experience more critically, her numbers in the remaining state primaries could drop enough to maintain Obama’s lead in the nomination battle.

It’s reasonable to ask whether anybody familiar with Hillary Clinton’s public career is the least bit surprised by the fact that she invented a chilling tale out of whole cloth to bolster, in some unfathomable way, her foreign policy credentials. Most of the discussion appears to be over whether she knew she was lying or not.

Personally — and this may surprise some of my readers — I actually think her tenure as First Lady was relevant experience, not on the foreign policy side, but on the government administration side. She acted as de facto White House Chief of Staff, a role requiring considerable strength and skill (West Wing fans, think Leo McGarry, only in pumps and mean as an angry polecat). She can’t really say this, though, because as Chief of Staff, she would have been right in the middle of all those scandals that got sold as “administrative screw-ups,” and would have to admit to being the chief screw-up — or admit that crimes were committed competently. It’s a dilemma that she will avoid, and wisely.

Regardless, the Democratic election tactics are continuing to yield amazingly good tactical data for the Republicans, who are taking notes. Both candidates will arrive at the Denver convention as damaged goods, and the sound bites that work best against them will have been battle-tested. I guess my satisfaction is not really schadenfreude after all; I do genuinely believe either of them would be dangerous holding the reins of power, so I’m glad of anything that will help defeat them in the fall. Still, keep the confessional warmed up and ready…

Update: I just found this marvelous video of Col. David Hunt, former Tactical Advisor to the Commander-in-Chief in Bosnia and current commentator for Fox News, explaining to Bill O’Reilly why this is so insulting to military personnel. This line is priceless:

We had F-18s overhead… we had attack helicopters, we had 40 tanks, there was an armored division at Tuzla, there were 4,000 armed men, Secret Service, and Navy Seals. There wasn’t anybody coughing in the Balkans the day she showed up.

It really is getting tougher to be a dishonest politician these days. It used to be, the biggest danger was forgetting which lie you’d told. Now you have to worry about unexpected news footage showing up on TV, and event organizers remembering the details. God bless the Internet.