Hillary To Russert: Bill And I Aren't The Same Person, Tim
September 27, 2007 -- 11:40 AM EST // //
There was a pretty great moment during yesterday's Dem debate that has already gotten a bit of attention but that really deserves its own video for posterity. It perfectly captures the Beltway punditocracy's inability to approach Bill and Hillary as anything but a freakish two-headed political creature.
In it, Tim Russert sandbagged Hillary by reading her a quote from an unnamed 2006 guest on Meet the Press who'd approved of torture in extreme circumstances. After she disagreed with the quote, Russert flipped open his jack-in-the-box, informing her that the MTP guest she'd just disagreed with was...her hubby!
When Russert proceeded to ask whether this showed that she disagreed with Bill, Hillary offered a fairly straightforward comeback: Bill and I aren't the same person, Timmy.
Take a look:
Russert said, in an I-gotcha-now tone:
"The guest who laid out this scenario for me was...William Jefferson Clinton, last year. So he disagrees with you."To which a visibly irked Hillary responded:
"Well, he's not standing here right now."This was met with loud applause. Then, after Russert pressed the point that there was a disagreement here, Hillary joked, with mock sheepishness and embarrassment:
"Well, I'll talk to him later."This in turn was met by more applause and laughter. Gotcha this wasn't.
Look, I'm not blind to the fact that an exchange like this, when handled as well as it was here, plays to Hillary's benefit in a big way, giving her a golden chance to proclaim her independence. Indeed, her campaign is touting this as "the moment." But the real takeaway here is that whatever you think of Russert's performance last night in other areas, what he did here was deeply silly.
The problem here is the premise of this little trick: That it's somehow a "gotcha" to "catch" the Clintons disagreeing about something. This idea is premised on the notion that Hillary's views should be evaluated relentlessly through the lense of what Bill thinks. And this, of course, is an outgrowth of the larger conceit that the Beltway punditocracy has tried to foist on this race for months: Namely that voters should, and will, feel the cold shadow of Bill and his Presidency as they decide whether to vote for his wife.
It doesn't matter, of course, that in poll after poll the public rejects this view. A recent Gallup poll, for instance, asked respondents whether they worried about how much or how little a role Bill would play in a Hillary Presidency. An astounding 68% said they didn't worry about it one way or the other. I'm not arguing that Bill won't matter at all to voters. It's just that in the punditocracy hall of mirrors, where pundits confuse Bill's importance to them with importance to voters, his significance has been magnified into outsized and even grotesque forms.
Policy differences between Hillary and Bill, of course, are legit topics. But setting this up as a gotcha was at bottom just a cheap stunt, designed to get a titter out of Beltway insiders. Bill and Hillary aren't the same person. Not sure why this is so hard to grasp.
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