Hillary’s Tall Tales at Tuzla – Is this the end?

I respect Hillary Clinton as one of the most capable First Ladies in US history. She failed in some of her signature efforts, including especially health care reform, but she persisted in offering substantive advice on policy matters. She was no Laura Bush.

But throughout this campaign Hillary Clinton has gone very close to the sin of resume-padding: making her White House experience more than it really was. The release of her First Lady calender offers mixed results on her claims to major policy experience in the White House. Her claims on Northern Ireland are mildly exaggerated, but seem significant nonetheless. Her assertions about NAFTA seem completely confused, but I have no idea what to make of it in total.

However, the one issue that seems to be most exaggerated is her claims about her 1996 trip to Bosnia. She has offered that trip as an example of her courage and ability to literally show poise under fire. It’s a pretty harrowing tale with references to sniper fire and corkscrew maneuvers. But it’s probably not true. Comedian Sinbad already called her out on it, saying the trip was as routine as you can get. She responded by offering more detail about running from the plane with heads covered and a greeting ceremony canceled. She was doubling down.

And now she has gone bust. Video of her Bosnia trip has surfaced and it shows a decidedly different picture of the Tuzla trip. Watch the video below and you’ll see: there was no sniper fire. She made that part up. And she got caught on video.

Frankly, I think this is a killer for her campaign. It isn’t complicated and it isn’t just controversial. It’s just so embarrassingly and insultingly wrong. This is just a lie that she thought wouldn’t get reported. If – and when – the mainstream media pushes this prevarication with the video, she will face enormous pressure to correct herself. This was her only trip to Bosnia, and this video came from that trip. Who are we going to believe: Hillary Clinton or our lying eyes?

The reason this is so bad for her is timing. If this had come out last year nobody would notice. There’d be a few late night comedian jokes about it, but then it would fall down the memory hole. But today she is trying to make a desperate case for why her candidacy is still viable. With no Florida or Michigan revote, she would need an historic stomping of Obama in ALL remaining states to take the pledged delegate lead OR the popular vote lead.

The Wright controversy could have been the opportunity she needed to pull Obama down, but Obama handled it with such class that he may have actually benefited from it over the long term; he confronted the issue long before the fall and he delivered a historic speech on race that clearly impressed many arch-conservatives like Charles Murray, Christopher Caldwell, Jack Kemp and Peggy Noonan. Polling shows he recovered from the Wright issue quite well too.

So now Hillary Clinton is left needing a perfect campaign and more bad news for Obama. What she could not afford was an embarrassing revelation about resume-padding that will certainly get mocked by late night comedians and even journalists. She couldn’t afford a massive error like this at this time. It conjured up the claims of serial exaggeration by Al Gore and even John Kerry. It made her look fake, and her claims to executive experience and crisis readiness look fraudulent. I don’t think she can recover from this.