Don’t worry, Hillary. Al Gore feels your pain.
Over the past few weeks, you may have noticed that Clinton has been portrayed in the press less as a presidential candidate gearing up for a potentially decisive primary in Pennsylvania and more like, well, Pinocchio. The spurt of prevarication started with “Snipergate,” Clinton’s debunked account of exactly how dangerous her 1996 landing in war-torn Bosnia really was. Then came a flood of “gotcha” reports on everything from Clinton’s original support of NAFTA to her role in the Northern Ireland peace process; Clinton foe Dick Morris even revived a 2001 controversy over daughter Chelsea’s Sept. 11 whereabouts.
Some of these reality checks raised important questions about Clinton’s claims of foreign-policy expertise. Others (like Morris’s rather baseless Chelsea murmuring) did not. But because all of them contributed to a suddenly salable Clinton “metanarrative”–the former First Lady as “serial exaggerator”–they’ve received a ton of attention on TV, in the papers and online. As Tom Rosenstiel, director of Project for Excellence in Journalism, put it in 2001, “journalists are looking for a story line, a narrative device, that plays out over weeks and months.” So even though Obama has stretched the truth (as politicians are wont to do) regarding his parents’ reasons for marrying and his role in filling out a “liberal” 1996 survey (among other things), his slips didn’t conform to the preferred “new kind of candidate” metanarrative–and therefore went largely unnoticed. Meanwhile, Clinton has spent the last month getting made over as the new Gore, who was pilloried in 2000 for “inventing the Internet.”
There’s only one problem: metanarratives tends to bulldoze nuance–and, in effect, reality. “The problem is if [journalists] let the narrative overwhelm the facts, then it becomes a distorting lens,” said Rosenstiel. “It can lead journalists to ignore and mischaracterize facts as they try to fit them into the story.” That’s what happened back in 2000, for example; Gore, of course, never really claimed to have invented the Internet. And it’s what’s happening right now with Clinton, whose latest “gaffe”–the story, oft-repeated on the stump, of “a young woman who lost her baby and later died because she lacked health insurance and did not have $100 to gain access to a nearby hospital”–isn’t a gaffe at all. If, that is, you take the time to examine it.
A little background. For weeks, Clinton repeated the anecdote at campaign appearances without naming the woman or the hospital. But on April 3, the Washington Post identified the woman, Trina Bachtel, 35, of Middleport, Ohio, who died last August; soon, officials at O’Bleness Memorial Hospital in Athens, Ohio, fearing their facility would be falsely accused, told the New York Times that while Bachtel’s baby was indeed stillborn there, Bachtel was never refused treatment and even had medical insurance. “We implore the Clinton campaign to immediately desist from repeating this story,” CEO Rick Castrop said. The press pounced–and Clinton’s campaign said she would slash the story from her speeches.
It turns out that a few alterations would have been sufficient. For starters, Clinton first heard the story from supporter Bryan Holman, the Meigs County deputy sheriff, at a campaign stop in Pomeroy, Ohio on Feb. 28. In a March 26 phone interview with The Associated Press, “Holman said he had told Clinton the story in essentially the same way she was retelling it in her speeches”; what’s more, Holman never gave Clinton Bachtel’s name or the name of the hospital in question, making it near-impossible for her staffers to identify either one after the fact (they tried). This happens daily on the trail, and every presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan has eagerly recounted such tales. Secondly, while O’Bleness’s account was, in fact, true, so was “Clinton’s claim that Bachtel did not get care at another hospital that wanted a $100 pre-payment before seeing her, according to the young woman’s aunt, Lisa Casto.” From the Washington Post:
[Casto] said her niece had previously been in debt to a local hospital that later sent her a letter informing her that she could only be treated there in the future if she gave them a $100 deposit. At the time she went into debt to that hospital, Casto said, Bachtel was uninsured, though she later obtained health insurance and was insured at the time of her death… Casto said her niece, who suffered from preeclampsia during her pregnancy, did not seek care at the first hospital when she fell ill because she knew she did not have the $100 out-of-pocket she believed she would need to be seen. Instead, she went to O’Bleness Memorial Hospital, where her baby was stillborn.
In other words, Clinton’s version was accurate in all but its setting–which Holman didn’t specify in the first place. Without insurance, Bachtel went into debt to Hospital A, and delayed treatment there because she didn’t have the $100 that she thought she’d have to fork over; when her condition worsened, Bachtel, now insured, finally sought treatment at Hospital B. But by then it was too late. As the Associated Press’s Charles Babbington puts it, “according to Casto’s account, Bachtel’s medical tragedy began with circumstances very close to the essence of Clinton’s now-abandoned account: the lack of insurance created a $100 barrier to needed medical attention close to home.” It’s true that if Clinton staffers had gone to Herculean lengths to verify the details of Holman’s unspecific account, they might’ve discovered the shift in setting. But to say that the Bachtel story represents “yet another” Clinton exaggeration rather than a good-faith effort to relay a real, illustrative story of health-care difficulties in America–albeit with some details lost in translation–is in itself a rather blatant exaggeration. Of course, that’s the problem with these metanarratives.
Just ask the Goracle.
UPDATE, 12:58 p.m.: An exchange between MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann and the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank on last night’s Countdown that perfectly illustrates my point:
OLBERMANN: We learned over the weekend that this story that Senator Clinton has told on the campaign trail repeatedly, this uninsured pregnant woman, was not exactly precise. Walk us through the story and whether or not she had earned a mulligan on that one.
MILBANK: I think she probably does get a mulligan on the specifics of this story. It’s about a 35-year-old pregnant woman who had a stillborn child and then she died herself. The question is: it was said that she could not go to a particular hospital unless she paid $100 upfront and she wasn’t insured. Well, she wasn’t insured at an earlier time, and the hospital that wouldn’t treat her unless she paid $100 isn’t the one she actually went to.
But in the interview, as people have found out, well, basically the guts of the story are true and probably, this woman, had she gotten better care, things would have turned out better. The problem is, when you’re in this sort of exaggeration position as previously Al Gore and John Kerry found themselves in, it’s very hard to escape this. So, even a fairly innocent one like this, is just one more piece on the pile.
Emphasis added. So even though the “guts of the story are true,” Clinton deserves to take flak because she’s in an “exaggeration position” and the Bachtel incident, though “fairly innocent… is just one more piece of the pile.” If you need proof that press cares more about process (how does the appearance of falsehood play politically?) than reality (were Clinton’s remarks were actually false?), look no further. Milbank indulges in speculation about the former even as he refutes the latter.
