by Mark Silva
The Clinton campaign maintains that people who recall Hillary Clinton making a pointedly derisive remark about Southern voters many years ago are not remembering it right.
The question was stirred by a column in The Huffington Post this week, in which Sam Stein wrote about an account of that comment published a few years back by an author:
“In January 1995, as the Clintons were licking their wounds from the 1994 congressional elections, a debate emerged at a retreat at Camp David. Should the administration make overtures to working class white Southerners who had all but forsaken the Democratic Party?” Stein wrote. “The then-first lady took a less than inclusive approach.
“Screw ’em,” she told her husband. “You don’t owe them a thing, Bill. They’re doing nothing for you; you don’t have to do anything for them.”
“The statement — which author Benjamin Barber witnessed and wrote about in his book, The Truth of Power: Intellectual Affairs in the Clinton White House — was prompted by another speaker raising the difficulties of reaching “Reagan Democrats’,” Stein wrote. It stands in stark contrast to the attitude the New York Democrat has recently taken on the campaign trail, in which she has presented herself as the one candidate who understands the working-class needs.”
“I think this quote that has gotten some attention… differs from the recollection of other people who were in the room,” Phil Singer, a spokesman for the Clinton campaign, said this morning on a conference call with reporters. Others who were there “not only don’t remember the comment being made, but also don’t reflect a meeting… reflecting the kind of tone and tenor that is implied….
“If you look at the way that Sen. Clinton has lived her life, the kind of policies she has pursued,” the spokesman said, “I think it is quite clear that she has advocated a progressive agenda aimed at lifting all Americans up… not just those in one region.”
So, are they saying that the author, a noted political scientist, got the story wrong? Are they saying the author is wrong? “I’m not going to get into an argument with him or anyone else whose recollection may be different,” Singer said. “We’ve given our answer on this.”
Here is more from Stein’s own account at HuffPo:“Those who were at the event say the 1995 episode fits into her larger viewpoint. As Harry Boyte, the director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Democracy and Citizenship who was at the retreat, told The Huffington Post: “[Hillary Clinton] sees herself as the champion of the oppressed, but there is always a kind of good guy versus bad guy mentality. The comment before that was that ‘the Reagan Democrats are our enemies and they weren’t on our side,’ and she was agreeing with that comment. She said we should write them off: screw them.”
A spokesperson for Clinton said the quote was taken out of context and did not reflect her true political philosophy. “This quote differs from the recollection of others who were in the room at the time this comment was allegedly made,” said Jay Carson. “To be clear, that’s not how she felt then and it’s not how she feels now, and the proof is in how she has lived her life, the work she has done and the policies she has pushed and pursued over the last 35 years.”
Asked to produce a witness who would say that Clinton had been misquoted, Carson wrote: “So, you’ve got two guys we’ve barely heard of remembering a verbatim quote from 13 years ago?… Sounds totally and completely reliable.”
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