Hillary Clinton is ‘majoring in the minor’
by George E. Curry, NNPA Columnist
With only nine remaining contests and no mathematical chance of overtaking the frontrunner, Hillary Clinton continues to, as Jesse Jackson puts it, major in the minor. In other words, instead of addressing the big picture, she is engaged in insignificant sideshows.
Clinton’s most notable example of this is her trying to depict Barack Obama as an elitist. It’s almost comical that a United States senator who graduated from the elite Wellesley College in |
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Massachusetts and Yale Law School would complain that a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School is an elitist.
From an educational standpoint, both of them are elitists. However, when you look at their personal upbringing, their lives could not have been more different.
Obama’s father left home when he was 2-years-old. For a while, Obama was reared by a mother who at times had to rely on food stamps. During his high school years, he was reared in Hawaii by his grandparents.
Born in Chicago, Clinton grew up in the affluent suburb of Park Ridge. Her father, Hugh Rodham, was a successful textile wholesaler. His mother, Dorothy, was a homemaker. Who is the elitist?
In another sideshow, Clinton tries to exploit Obama’s comment made at a private fundraiser in San Francisco that economically-stressed residents in small Pennsylvania towns are bitter and cling to their guns and religion while rejecting people who are not like them.
During the debate, Obama explained his view.
"This is the first economic expansion that we just completed in which ordinary people’s incomes actually went down when adjusted for inflation. At the same time, the costs of everything, from health care to gas at the pump, has skyrocketed.
"And so the point I was making was that when people feel like Washington’s not listening to them, when they’re promised year after year, decade after decade, that their economic situation is going to change and it doesn’t, then, politically, they end up focusing on those things that are constant like religion," he said.
"They end up feeling this is a place where I can find some refuge. This is something I can count on.
"They end up being much more concerned about votes around things like guns, where traditions have been passed on from generation to generation. And those are incredibly important to them. And, yes, what is also true is that wedge issues, hot-button issues, end up taking prominence in our politics."
Clinton majored in the minor during the debate when she again tried to exploit Obama’s connection with his former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright.
She said, "You get to choose your pastor. You don’t choose your family, but you get to choose your pastor. And when asked a direct question, I said I would not have stayed in the church."
As Obama pointed out, Clinton’s former pastor said Wright has been unfairly caricatured and his words had been taken out of context.
Clinton also tried to scare voters by trying to link Obama to radical terrorists of the 1960s and 1970s.
She singled out William Ayers a former member of the Weather Underground. The issue was first raised by George Stephanopoulous, the co-moderator, but continued by Clinton.
Clinton: I also believe that Senator Obama served on a board with Mr. Ayers for a period of time, the Woods Foundation, which was a paid directorship position.
And, if I’m not mistaken, that relationship with Mr. Ayers on this board continued after 9/11 and after his reported comments, which were deeply hurtful to people in New York and, I would hope, to every American, because they were published on 9/11, and he said that he was just sorry they hadn’t done more.
And what they did was set bombs. And in some instances, people died. So it is--I think it is, again, an issue that people will be asking about.
FactCheck.org stated, "In fact, nobody died as a result of bombings in which Ayers said he participated as part of the Weather Underground, at the New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, in a men’s lavatory in the Capitol building in 1971 and in a women’s restroom in the Pentagon in 1972.
"The deaths to which Clinton referred were of three Weather Underground members who died when their own "bomb factory" exploded in a Greenwich Village townhouse on March 6, 1970. Ayers was not present.
"Also, two police officers were murdered in connection with the robbery of a Brinks armored car by Weather Underground members in 1981.
"That was about a year after Ayers had turned himself in and after all charges against him had been dropped."
FactCheck.org also stated: "Obama also correctly said that President Bill Clinton had pardoned or commuted the sentences of two Weather Underground members, who had, unlike Ayers, been convicted and sentenced to long prison terms. Bill Clinton indeed pardoned one and commuted the sentence of another."
Once again, Hillary Clinton has demonstrated that in politics, as in war, truth is the first casualty.
George E. Curry, former editor-in-chief of "Emerge" magazine and the NNPA News Service, is a keynote speaker, moderator, and media coach. He can be reached through his Web site, www.georgecurry.com.
