US Election 2008
Hillary Under Fire
By Gerard Baker Times on line
Mar 25, 2008 - 9:01:19 PM

It seems that Hillary's latest tale of derring do, her gripping account of how she dodged sniper fire on a trip to Bosnia twelve years ago and had to bolt from her helicopter on landing were, shall we say, at odds with the more prosaic reality as captured by this now famous video from CBS. News.

Shame being in notably short supply in the Clinton campaign (Judas, anyone?), I had half expected them to try to tough this one out. Perhaps they would claim that the CBS clip didn't show the moment when Mrs Clinton and Sheryl Crow came under fire from angry Serb gatecrashers ticked off that Sinbad wasn't geting more time at the microphone? That girl in the video handing her what looked like a greeting card at the arrival ceremony that wasn't supposed to have happened? Perhaps we'd be told it contained traces of a noxious substance that Mrs Clinton bravely ignored in the pursuit of some valuable hands-on foreign policy experience?

But it wasn't to be. Mrs Clinton claimed instead she merely "misspoke". That's fair enough. People do that. I can recall a president a while back saying "I never had sex with that woman". Turned out he misspoke too.

I had once thought that Mrs Clinton's sheer determination to fight on was her greatest asset. But now it looks merely like desperation. Her main hope seems to be to hang on in the hope that something really horrible will emanate from the Obama campaign. That could happen. I'm with Christopher Hitchens in not being quite so impressed by St Barack's Epistle To the Americans on race last week.

But is this the way the Democrats really want their contest to end? Watch as the Clintons and their allies raise enough doubts about Mr Obama' electability (code for "race") that the superdelegates will turn to her in the wreckage?

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