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There you have it: Clinton’s closing argument in Pennsylvania. With only four days left before a primary that she needs to win–and win big–the New York senator and her surrogates have clearly decided to flesh out the emerging caricature of Obama as an effete elitist with debate-related taunts. Speaking yesterday from the front porch of an American Legion Hall in St. Mary’s, former President Bill Clinton kicked off the festivities. “After the [debate], her opponents… were saying, ‘Oh this is so negative, why are they doing this,’” he said. “Well, they’ve been beatin’ up on her for 15 months. I didn’t hear her whining when he said she was untruthful in Iowa.” And a few moments ago here Radnor High School on Philadelphia’s tony Main Line, Hillary herself ratcheted up the rhetoric. “My opponent [is] complaining about the hard questions,” she said, as the crowd “awwwed” sarcastically. “Having been in the White House for eight years and seen what happens in terms of pressures and stresses on the resident, I’m with Harry Truman on this: if you can’t stand the heat get out of the kitchen. And speaking for myself, I’m very comfortable in the kitchen. If the heat goes up, that’s okay with me.”
I can understand the politics at work here: Clinton is hoping to boost her margins among tough-guy, blue-collar Reagan Democrats, trounce her rival on Tuesday and thereby sow doubts about his electability among superdelegates. But there are two problems with her logic. For starters, Obama never actually, you know, “complain[ed] about how much pressure there is, and how hard the questions are” (even if his supporters have harrumphed that the moderators were petty and one-sided). Far from whining, in fact, Obama has gone on the attack, accusing Clinton of playing “politics as usual” during the debate. “She was taking every opportunity to get a dig in there, that’s her right to kind of twist the knife a little bit,” Obama said yesterday in Raleigh, N.C. “That’s how our politics has been taught to be played. That’s the lesson that she learned when the Republicans were doing that same thing to her back in the 1990s, so I understand it. And when you’re running for the presidency, you’ve got to expect it.” Then, chuckling, he brushed some metaphorical dirt off his shoulders–to thunderous applause:
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Not exactly cowering in the corner, right?
The second problem: as Jake Tapper notes, the Clintons and the Clinton campaign have been complaining for months about the media’s treatment of Hillary. There was the campaign video complaining about the “Politics of Pile-on” after a November debate in which Clinton, then the clear frontrunner, suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous attacks (from her fellow Democrats, no less). Then came Clinton’s complaints in the Cleveland debate seven weeks ago about always getting the first question. And Bill has complained every chance he gets. “The political press has avowedly played a role in this election,” he said in a February interview. “I’ve never seen this before.”
As Tapper puts it, “If you haven’t heard whining from your wife or from the Clinton campaign, Mr. President, then with all due respect, you haven’t been paying attention.”
Amen. The truth is, the occasional complaint about the media doesn’t disqualify anyone from leading the free world. So Clinton should probably stop pretending that it does–especially when she’s the only candidate who’s actually indulged.
