If I'm not outraged, I must not be paying attention. So the bumper stickers tell me.

This week (well, OK, last week), according to the world of political blogs, I'm supposed to be outraged that Hillary Clinton mentioned the assassination of Bobby Kennedy in 1968. Somehow this is supposed to be an offensive comment not just to the Kennedys but also to Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, and ... well, pretty much everyone.

Now I happen to think most political gaffe stories are way overblown. Sometimes people make dumb jokes or careless comments. Presidential candidates are on the campaign trail for months on end, speaking all day every day, and somebody's video camera is recording nearly all of it. Inevitably, someone will fish out the 15 seconds out of 200,000 that look most like a gaffe. It ends up on YouTube, and everybody in the blogosphere writes articles about it. No matter how bad the gaffe is — and a lot of them barely gaffes at all — it's absurd to judge the candidates based on what they said in those 15 seconds, to the exclusion of the other 60-plus hours recorded that week. For that matter, as often as not, we're judging the 15 seconds without even looking at the five minutes surrounding them.

That's why I don't care if months ago at some obscure local veterans meeting McCain sang "bomb Iran" or whatever other silly gaffe is supposed to drive my choice for president.

But the fuss over Clinton's mention of Robert Kennedy is even sillier than most. I found the video clip, and it was nothing at all like the breathless stories described. Clinton is talking to a panel of newspaper editors, answering the question of why she doesn't quit the race. She argues that it used to be considered perfectly normal for a primary to continue into June, and as evidence of that she recalls that Bobby Kennedy was assassinated while campaigning for the California primary, and that was in June.

Now I would agree that there are plenty of holes in Clinton's argument, not least of which is that when she brought up Bobby Kennedy she started out, "we all remember when...". I'm not exactly a young voter, but I was two years old when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, so no, I don't remember that. Still, it's a reasonably familiar historical fact, and if you know that he was campaigning in the primary and you know it happened in June, it's a reasonable data point.

She might have mentioned the 1984 Democratic primary, which I do remember. That was the first election I took any interest in, and it's still the primary I remember most vividly. By May, Mondale had pulled ahead of Hart, but the race was not settled until June 8, when California and New Jersey voted. I was 18 that year, about the same age Hillary Clinton was in 1968. Maybe the 1968 primary is the one she remembers most vividly. That would explain why for her it came to mind more readily than more recent examples.

For her to mention Bobby Kennedy in this context is just a random innocuous and unremarkable comment out of thousands made on the campaign trail. To Clinton's opponents, however, it is a Freudian slip. This little remark, they say, reveals that Clinton's real motive for staying in the race is that she's hoping someone will shoot Barack Obama and she can become president in his place. For this horrible faux pas — whether the alleged gaffe is that she wishes Obama dead or that she was rude enough to admit it, I'm not sure — she is a horrible psychopathic monster. I don't get this at all. If that's honestly how you read the comment, I'd say you're the one who's deranged, not her.

11:22:31 PM  [permalink]  comment []