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Parsing Bill: "Hit Job" Edition
Posted by Josh Gerstein
Thu, 24 Jan 2008 at 2:11 PM
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President Clinton's claim Wednesday that he was on the receiving end of "a hit job" from Senator Obama's campaign is being treated in news accounts as a mysterious reference and perhaps evidence that the former president is coming unglued. Even Senator Clinton sounded baffled when asked about the remark in an AP interview. "He was thinking about something. You'll have to ask him what he means," she said.
The Sopranos-esque reference--"He put out a hit job on me "--is rather easily explained. Mr. Clinton is talking about this piece of opposition research released by Mr. Obama's camp in June detailing the former president's business dealings with an ex-supermarket magnate, target of alleged extortion by Page Six, and longtime benefactor of the Clintons, Ron Burkle.
As the first to report in detail on Mr. Clinton's sharp-edged comments at Dartmouth College and in Oakland, Calif., I see his riff in Charleston, S.C. Wednesday as largely derived from the earlier two. The "hit job" comment is simply a paraphrase of this remark from Dartmouth: "What about the Obama handout that was covered up, the press never reported on, implying that I was a crook? Scouring me—scathing criticism over my financial reports. Ken Starr spent $70 million to find out that I wouldn't take a nickel to see the cow jump over the moon." The lifeless written words don't do justice to the emotion the former president added to "scouring" and "scathing" back in New Hampshire, notwithstanding his assertion Wednesday that, "I don't care about it today. I'm not upset about it."
The portion of the Charleston rant where Mr. Clinton went after journalists for refusing to focus on the substantive issues real voters were asking about is a theme the former president also struck in Oakland, where he challenged a television reporter for suggesting that Mrs. Clinton's allies were seeking to disenfranchise voters by suing to shut down casino-based caucuses in Nevada. "Get on your television station and say it: 'I don't care about the home mortgage crisis.' All I care about is making sure that some voters have it easier than others and that when they do vote, when it's already easier for them, their vote should count five times as much as others," Mr. Clinton said just after concluding a discussion with Oakland-area residents facing foreclosure in the subprime mortgage collapse.
As regards the anti-press content of Mr. Clinton's Charleston statement, his most bitter remarks seem to have been directed not at the journalist who triggered the exchange, Jessica Yellin of CNN, but at a reporter who asked Mr. Clinton if he was blaming Mr. Obama for injecting racial issues into the campaign, Glenn Thrush of Newsday. Mr. Thrush says the retort, "You just want one more story. Shame on you," was directed at him.
Mr. Clinton seems to have a bit of affection for the "hit job" phrase, especially when he gets mad. It figured in a high profile dust up last year when he told Chris Wallace of Fox News, "You did your nice little conservative hit job on me." (Mr. Obama also got in on the act, calling a report Fox publicized about him attending a madrassa, "an obvious right-wing hit job.") Anyone trying to take stock of Mr. Clinton's recent salvos may want to consider that while the press deemed his confrontation with Mr. Wallace to be an embarrassment, liberal Democrats were delighted with the fire the former president showed sticking it to a news outlet they loathe.
For the record, Mr. Clinton's claim that "the press never reported on" the Obama campaign memo attacking his ties to Mr. Burkle is overstated. To be sure, the attack didn't get much coverage, but the New York Times posted the memo to the Web a couple of times and referred to it obliquely here. Variety blogged it here. There is something counter-intuitive about a candidate's spouse complaining that suggestions of financial impropriety about him weren't adequately aired. But if Mr. Clinton's point is that news coverage of his ties to Mr. Burkle should note that the Obama camp has tried to fan the flames on those issues, he has a fair one.
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