First there was Senator Barack Obama’s bad week. Is it about to shift to Senator Hillary Clinton? According to ABC News, the release of Clinton schedule documents are raising questions about her contention that she has great experience in dealing with Oval Office matters:
The release of 17,000 pages of then-first lady Hillary Clinton’s daily schedule in the White House has raised questions about her ability to answer the 3 a.m. phone call she talks about in her commercials.
…But the daily schedules released today show many of her overseas trips to be the standard first lady tourist fare, hospital visits and blinis with caviar.
(UPDATE: The Clinton campaign is now demanding Obama release all records related to indicted Chicago businessman Antoin “Tony” Rezko, arguing that if disclosure is the issue, then Obama must disclose more. This seems to be an effort to change the news narrative on this story, since it’ll be all over the news cycle, perhaps longer as reporters sift through the pages and perhaps ask Clinton for details.)
(UPDATE II: The materials have already sparked a news story that Clinton was indeed pushing for NAFTA, despite her campaign statements in Ohio.)
The devil is in the details — and it could bedevil the Clinton campaign which could start to receive incoming fire from the Obama camp as well as from reporters who will be pressing her for comment and more info to document her experience.
But what surfaces so far, according to ABC News, is not stellar:
On the day U.S. cruise missiles hit Serbia, the schedules show the former first lady was touring Egyptian ruins.
On the day when her husband announced attacks against al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan, the schedules show she stayed in Martha’s Vineyard on vacation.
“They need to be a lot more open. We need to see memoranda of conversations; we need to see decision memos,” Sally Bedell Smith, author of “For Love of Politics – Bill and Hillary Clinton: The White House Years” and contributing editor to “Vanity Fair,” told ABC News.
The documents also fail to shed light on the most controversial of the eight years the Clintons were in the White House.
And then there’s this item:
On Dec. 7, 2000, the former first lady’s schedule lists all private White House meetings with no names attached.
It was the very time her two brothers and others were trying to broker pardons for convicted drug dealers and billionaire fugitive Marc Rich.
The Clinton campaign has responded to the ABC report. It said “the release of the documents shows the transparency of Sen. Clinton, and the released schedules are only ‘an outline’ and do not reflect ‘meetings with staff and officials, impromptu strategy sessions’ or a call to a world leader.”
That response may not be enough. There ‘s reportedly sufficient eyebrow-raising material there so the issue will come up with reporters. Also, in terms of imagery, news stories will focus on what the materials show — not on what materials might not have shown, as the Clinton campaign is framing it. The Clinton response will get a paragraph in print, and a few seconds on broadcast (and likely none on Fox). The bulk of the story will be fairly long in newspapers and take up a few minutes on broadcast. Net result: a media minus for Clinton (so far).
The Obama campaign could now run counter commercials saying Clinton talked about experience but ABC News concluded, after looking at the documents, that they didn’t find it. Etc.
The documents also reportedly cast light on
—Hillary Clinton and the Monica Lewinsky scandal (it shows she was home when Monica was there at times). She was there on the “stained blue dress day.”
—Hillary Clinton and Vince Foster
–Early signs of a planned Senate run.
Note again that these are schedules and not detailed memos. But the bottom line is, it’s going to put out into the news cycles aspects of the Clinton administration that were controversial and the media could be asking for more details on some items.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.