Day: April 6, 2008

If you only count what I say between two specific dates, then when I change my mind later I can make it look as if I am on whatever side I want you to think I am.

That seems to be Hillary Clinton’s strategy for defending against an assertion by Barack Obama that just won’t go away. In discussing their records on Iraq, Obama has said he’ll put his judgement up against Clinton’s experience any day. Obama opposed the war from Day One while Clinton voted to authorize Bush to invade.

But Clinton now wants to only count what happened from 2005, when Obama took office in the U.S. Senate, and wipe out all his prior years of resistance in the Illinois state senate. ABC’s Jake Tapper deconstructed Clinton’s argument and found that even using the selective time frame, it was still lacking.

In Eugene, Ore., Saturday. Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., attempted to change the measure by which anyone might assess who criticized the Iraq war first, her or Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., by saying those keeping records should start in January 2005, when Obama joined the Senate. (A measure that conveniently avoids her October 2002 vote to authorize use of force against Iraq at a time that Obama was speaking out against the war.) She claimed that using that measure she criticized the war in Iraq before Obama did.

But Clinton’s claim was false.

…It’s an odd way to measure opposition to the war — comparing who gave the first criticism of the war in Iraq starting in January 2005, ignoring Obama’s opposition to the war throughout 2003 and 2004.

But even if one were to employ this “Start Counting in January 2005” measurement, Clinton did not criticize the war in Iraq first.

[…]

Hillary Clinton’s parsing, revising, and exaggerating on the campaign trail have taken a toll on her image, according to a recent poll. A lot of people say they think she’s a phony.

A recent Gallup Poll found that 53 percent of Americans think Clinton isn’t “honest and trustworthy.” Just 29 percent said the same of her Democratic rival Barack Obama, and 27 percent said it of Republican John McCain.

Gallup analyst Jeffrey Jones called the credibility gap between Clinton and McCain “the largest between any two candidates for any dimension tested.”

It’s not just Gallup, and it’s not just the Bosnia story, which turned out to be demonstrably false, and which the candidate explained away by saying she was tired from campaigning and not thinking straight. And it wasn’t even 3 a.m. Can you imagine what Clinton would have said if Obama offered that excuse?

Another recent poll, this one conducted by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center before Clinton had to back down from her account of her Bosnia trip, found that 29 percent of white Democrats considered her a “phony,” almost twice as many as the 15 percent who described Obama that way.

Pew researchers concluded that Democrats’ views of Clinton “are more influenced by perceptions that she is phony than by any other trait or emotion tested.”