Hillary Mis-Remembers

Here's what happened: Hillary R. (!) Clinton pulled an Al Gore the other day and allowed as to how something had happened to her in Bosnia which, in fact, had not.

According to the reporting by Jim Malone of the Voice of America:

"Last week, Clinton said she recalled landing at the airport under sniper fire and that she and other members of her party had to run to vehicles with their heads down.

"But news footage of the visit showed an apparently relaxed Clinton greeted on the tarmac by a welcoming group that included an eight-year-old girl."

Unfortunately for Sen. Clinton a CBS crew was with her on that trip to Bosnia and it was something calmer than the hair-raising experience she described.

You can link to the CBS coverage of the actual arrival ceremony on the Secret Decoder Ring page.

Far from having to run in a serpentine manner (similar to Alan Arkin in "The In-Laws") Hillary Clinton was accepting hugs from little girls, handshakes from soldiers and posing for photos with the troops.

I have often said that Al Gore and I have something in common: If we invent a story up and keep telling it, after a while we think it actually happened.

Now, it seems, we can add Hillary to our little club of Self-Delusional Dopes.

SIDEBAR

I told the story yesterday morning on Fox & Friends of having met Sen. Clinton shortly before Thanksgiving in the Palace in the Green Zone in Baghdad.

I said that I had had to corkscrew into Baghdad International Airport on a C-130 on a number of occasions and it was possible she had substituted Bosnia for Baghdad.

I am not getting any younger and so am beginning to look for opportunities to atone for past sins.

END SIDEBAR

In the give-and-take of a Presidential campaign these are the kinds of mis-rememberances which make for great political fodder. Especially since the National Political Press Corps has been beating the you-know-what out of Barack H. (!) Obama for the past three weeks and have given the Clinton campaign a pass.

The next test for Hillary and Barack will be in Pennsylvania on April 22. Today is March 26. The damage the two campaigns can inflict upon one another in the next four weeks is music to the ears of the McCain campaign.

Remember earlier this month when the Intelligencia Politica was confidently predicting that Sen. John McCain having closed out the GOP competition was actually bad news for him?

You may also remember that I more-or-less vehemently disagreed with that assessment in a column titled Glass Half Empty; Glass Half Full.

The national head-to-head polling a potential general election match-up between McCain and either Obama or Clinton has McCain slightly ahead of either one. (The lead is so tiny as to be useless except for political columns such as this).

Nevertheless, given the state of the economy, the sub-prime mortgage sitch, the on-going conflict in Iraq and the general malaise amongst Republicans, either Clinton or Obama should be leading McCain by 20 or 25 percentage points.

They are not.

As the National Political Press Corps whipsaws between Clinton and Obama while Senator McCain meets with world leaders and receives the endorsement of the likes of Nancy Reagan this can only accrue to the benefit of the GOP nominee.

As my debate partner, Bob Beckel, pointed out on Fox this morning, "This is only March and there is a long way to go to November."

He's right. But the only way to stop the slugfest between Clinton and Obama is to have someone convince one of them they should accept defeat.

Obama is leading in both the delegate count and the total popular vote. He's not getting out.

Hillary comes from the Johann Goethe theory of politics: "What does not kill me makes me stronger," and she is far from dead and so, by definition, is getting stronger.

The polling in Pennsylvania shows her leading Barack by between 12 and 26 percentage points which means the fight for the Democratic nomination is likely to go on for months to come.

Hillary's imagined attack in Bosnia is (to misquote yet another movie) the stuff Republican dreams are made of.

On the Secret Decoder Ring page today: Links to the CBS footage, to an "In-Laws" page, the RealClearPolitcs page and the "other" movie. Also a Mullfoto which I thought was terribly amusing and a Catchy Caption of the Day.