History repeats itself, someone once said, because people don’t hear it right the first time. The problem with Sen. Hillary Clinton’s gaffe about Robert F. Kennedy is her failure to recall correctly the history she has helped make.
She was wrong on the facts, wrong in her argument and wrong in her recollection of the gut-wrenching fear and loathing that the second assassination of a Kennedy inflicted on Americans — across party lines.
Grasping at historical straws to explain why she is still campaigning instead of putting her campaign on hold, at least, the New York senator unleashed an argument that not only sounded breathtakingly tacky but also happened to be wrong on its facts.
“You know, my husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right?” she said to the editorial board of South Dakota’s Argus Leader. “We all remember, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California.”
Yes, he was. But her argument falls apart in light of how her husband, Bill Clinton, already had won more delegates than his nearest opponent, former California Gov. Jerry Brown, by the middle of April in 1992. There were not enough delegates left in the remaining primaries for Brown to catch up, even if he won all the remaining primaries.
And in 1968, then-Sen. Robert F. Kennedy had only entered the Democratic primary in mid-March, four days after President Lyndon B. Johnson narrowly defeated Sen. Eugene McCarthy in New Hampshire.
The current primary season started much earlier than other presidential campaigns, giving Democratic candidates extra time to bicker, after Republicans virtually nominated their front-runner, Sen. John McCain.
Clinton later apologized for the suggestion that Sen. Barack Obama might be assassinated. Nevertheless, her indelicate remarks laid bare her naked hope: Now that she’s exhausted any chance to win the Democratic nomination on her own merits, she speculates that something bad might happen to Obama.
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My column-writing colleague Michael Kinsley famously said that a “gaffe” in Washington is when somebody tells the truth. If so, Clinton appears to have revealed a “truth” that is devastatingly inconvenient to her political future.
In the South Dakota newspaper interview, Clinton scoffed at the importance of unifying her party before the votes are counted in the remaining primary states and in Puerto Rico. Instead Bill and Hillary Clinton, Yale-educated lawyers, wield the lawyerly argument that there’s no rule or law requiring them to quit. No, there are only quaint notions like grace, tradition, party unity and a desire to avoid letting your sense of entitlement show.
Hillary Clinton had made a similar reference to RFK in at least one earlier interview. But this time it had the added unfortunate timing to have come a day after the nation learned that Sen. Edward Kennedy had brain cancer. It also came closer to the 40th anniversary of Bobby Kennedy’s death. But, most of all, it came at a time when more people than ever are wondering why Clinton is still in the race.
Rolling Stone’s political correspondent Matt Taibbi observes, we may yet see the Clintons’ real legacy will be “institutionalizing the fight for power through lawyers and backroom maneuvering instead of votes.”
All it takes is a sense, endlessly argued by the Clintons, that a system that leaves them a few votes or delegates short must be a flawed system.
The irony for us old fogies with long memories is how the Clintons used to be passionately idealistic anti-war Baby Boomers. In George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign, they opposed the old-school Democratic bosses in “smoke-filled rooms.” Today, the Clintons have become old-school insiders fending off the insurgent anti-war campaign of Obama the Illinois upstart.
Ah, the irony. Now, hopes for an Obama-Clinton ticket may have hit the rocks with the RFK gaffe. Obama’s political chief, David Axelrod, sounded nothing but conciliatory in his call to “move on” during an ABC-TV appearance Sunday. But, at a time when Hillary Clinton has been trying to raise questions about Obama’s maturity, experience and judgment, she has given us a new reason to wonder about hers.
The Clinton camp still has bargaining power with the Obama camp, which does not want to lose the votes of her supporters. But Clinton faces the danger of winding up on the wrong side of the history that she is trying to make. She may yet be remembered in the way that then-Gov. Ronald Reagan was in 1976 and Sen. Edward Kennedy was in 1980 — as candidates whose primary challenges led to their party’s defeat in November.
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