Dan

Calabrese

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December 3, 2007

Hillary Clinton Exploits Near-Tragedy; Media Praise Her For It

I don’t mean to pick on David Paul Kuhn. The guy is a very experienced reporter and I’m sure he has excellent political insight.

But man. The Hillary “hostage crisis” is not even over for a day, and Mr. Kuhn has already written a piece for The Politico praising New York’s junior senator for seizing the “unexpected opportunity” to “look the part of president.”

Good grief. Political journalists are like Pavlov’s Dog when it comes to Hillary. Everything that happens with her, no matter what it is, is reported almost exclusively in the context of whether she handled the situation effectively so as to further her own political ambitions.

If she did, the journos give her an A-plus. And even if the situation says nothing whatsoever about her ability to handle the job of president of the United States, it makes no difference. It just has to look like it’s relevant. Then she gets credit for manipulating the situation to make herself look good.

To be fair, when she fumbles, they report that too. I don’t mean to suggest the media are uniformly pro-Hillary. It’s just that they long ago accepted the proposition that Hillary’s entire reason for being is to make herself president, and everything they report about her is reported in the context of how successfully she is serving this agenda. Nothing else matters.

So, back to our little hostage crisis. Some guy in Rochester, New Hampshire grabs a bunch of road flares, duct tapes them to himself and calls it a bomb. He figures this will be convincing enough to fool a bunch of Democrats, and he’s right.

So for several hours, drama unfolds. Hillary cancels her campaign appearances for the evening and “takes charge.”

How? Mr. Kuhn gives us the heroic details:

In her New Hampshire press conference, she stood before a column of police in green and tan uniforms. She talked of meeting with hostages. She mentioned that she spoke to the state’s governor about eight minutes after the incident began.

The scene was one of a woman in charge.

“It looked and sounded presidential,” said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics. “This was an instance of the White House experience of this campaign. They knew how to handle this.”

So let me see if I have this straight. She stood in front of a bunch of cops. Oh, I almost forgot, they were wearing tan and green! That makes a big difference. She talked to the hostages. What did she say? “Can’t you tell the difference between road flares and a bomb?” She called the governor. Did that get the road-flare-toting perp to give up faster?

This whole thing sounds like classic Hillary to me. You look in charge. Whether you actually accomplish anything is beside the point.

“You! Do this! You! Go there! You! Pick up those things! I’m in charge!”

The only kind of leadership that matters in a situation like this is the kind that gets the hostages the hell out of there. Calling the governor and standing next to the cops doesn’t make that happen.

But it’s not Hillary’s job to accomplish anything. It’s Hillary’s job to make Hillary look good and appear electable, which is why Mr. Kuhn sang from the usual songbook in giving her kudos for exploiting what could have been a tragedy.

Finally, he found a professor at Syracuse University who actually went on the record with this gem of a quote: “You had one of these breaking news stories . . .  and so everybody was glued to the set. She got on TV and provided a sense of closure and executive cool. It is like how Giuliani used television during his crisis.”

Of course. America under attack and 3,000 people dead. Rudy Giuliani, the man who actually ran the city, directing the response. And some bonehead with three road flares and some duct tape, demanding to speak to a woman who was preening in front of the green-and-tan-clad constables.

Yes. These two are the same. If Hillary can handle this, she can surely stand around and look in charge in the Oval Office.

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