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by Mark Silva
First the Clinton campaign ran the now-famous “3 a.m. phone call” ad asking voters in Texas who they want to answer the phone in the White House in the middle of the night when a crisis is brewing.
Now Bill Clinton, former president, says his wife, candidate for president and senator from New York, should be excused for overstating the circumstances of her now-famous landing in Bosnia (hold the sniper fire) because she had spoken late at night and she’s – well – 60.
“You woulda thought, you know, that she’d robbed a bank the way they all carried on about this,” Bill Clinton said this week about the reaction to Hillary Clinton’s statement about landing under sniper fire in Bosnia in 1996 – with videotape of the landing displaying a clearly different, and cheery scenario, a smiling stride from the belly of a cargo plane, a wave and a reception line with a little girl.
“Some of them, when they’re 60, they’ll forget something when they’re tired at 11 o’clock at night, too,” Bill Clinton said this week of Hillary Clinton’s comment.
The only trouble is, the senator had given this same account of a sniper-fire landing a few times, and not always late at night. The further trouble is that, once again, the former president has succeeded in stirring up controversy for his wife at a critical time in her presidential campaign – within two weeks of a Pennsylvania primary critical to her chances.
Sen. Barack Obama, giving Clinton a run for more than her money – outspending her by nearly three-to-one in Pennsylvania TV advertising — is probably none too unhappy to have the bizarre Bosnia landing episode revived at the ramparts of the Pennsylvania vote.
Obama said this today about Bill Clinton’s comments when asked as he was walking out of a press conference in Indianapolis:
“I will let the Clintons explain Bosnia.” Hillary Clinton already had apologized for her “misstatement,” and the Clinton campaign is suggesting that the mistake is all hers, as spokesman Phil Singer puts it: “Sen. Clinton appreciates her husband standing up for her, but this was her mistake and she takes responsibility for it.”
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Both explaining Bosnia and standing up for his wife are precisely what Bill Clinton was trying to do Thursday in Boonville, Ind.
“A lot of the way this whole campaign has been covered has amused me,” Clinton said at a campaign stop Thursday. “There was a lot of fulminating because Hillary, one time late at night when she was exhausted, misstated — and immediately apologized for it — what happened to her in Bosnia in 1995.
“Did y’all see all that? Oh, they blew it up.”
OK, say so the Bosnia trip was in 1996, not 1995.
But Clinton’s reference to it was not limited to the telling of the dramatic tale as an example of her foreign affairs experience as she rolled out that “3 a.m.” ad on Feb. 29 in Waco, Tex. She said then that the arrival ceremony “had to be moved inside because of sniper fire.” She also relayed the tale on March 17 in Washington: “I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.”
Clinton later claimed that she had misspoken, and the episode “proves I’m human.”
Human, and 60.
“Let me just tell you,” Bill Clinton said in Boonville. “The president of Bosnia and Gen. Wesley Clark – who was there making peace where we’d lost three peacekeepers, who had to ride on a dangerous mountain road because it was too dangerous to go the regular, safe way – both defended her because they pointed out that when her plane landed in Bosnia, she had to go up to the bulletproof part of the plane, in the front. Everybody else had to put their flak jackets underneath the seat in case they got shot at.
“And everywhere they went, they were covered by Apache helicopters.” He said. “So they just abbreviated the arrival ceremony.
“Now I say that because, what really has mattered is that even then she was interested in our troops,” he said, “And I think she was the first first lady since Eleanor Roosevelt to go into a combat zone. And you woulda thought, you know, that she’d robbed a bank the way they carried on about this. And some of them, when they’re 60, they’ll forget something when they’re tired at 11 at night, too.”
Okay, Pat Nixon also traveled to South Vietnam. But these are Bill Clinton’s mistakes.
At a time when Hillary Clinton needs all the help she can get.
The Tribune’s John McCormick contributed to this article.