So we have a diary on the recommended list here that excoriates Hillary Clinton for planting questions at campaign events. While I am somewhat perturbed at the possibility that Clinton's campaign events are somewhat reminiscent to those that George W. Bush held when he was busy campaigning for the White House, I am more disturbed by the inanity of the diary that is posted. I think the author of the linked diary above does a great job compiling her weekly diary series on Barack Obama, this does no service to him - or anyone else, frankly.
What's my problem? You have literally two instances where questions may or may not have been intentionally planted - out of a grand total of the 10 months or so that Clinton has officially been in the race. Just like the mainstream media, Kossacks seem to be showing an inherently unfair anti-Clinton bias by harping on what really is a story that deserves little airtime.
Unfortunately, the author of this diary misleads by stating that planting questions by the Clinton campaign has been "going on since April." This is an assertion that is falsely arrived at - there has been one potential occurrence in April, and one just now. To insinuate that the Clinton campaign has been planting questions on a continuous basis since then is a completely unsubstantiated claim. To be honest, it seems like two isolated incidents; I think it's only fair to deem it a pattern if a great number of people suddenly come forward and say they've had the same experience. But that hasn't happened yet, and I doubt it's likely to happen.
So, like the mainstream media, the author of the aforementioned diary starts to go out on a limb to create a story. Here's the first set of updates:
Hardball just showed a video of the student, who was planted, to ask Clinton the Global Warming question. After she asked Clinton the question, she winked, job done. Will post the video, when released by MSNBC.
Update [2007-11-12 19:28:13 by icebergslim]:
Here is the link from Hardball, it talks about the JJ Dinner, but shows the video of the planted questioner and in slow motion with the wink. Reported by David Shuster. It is here.
This is a stretch to me. I watched the video, and I would be extremely hard-pressed to call this irrefutable evidence that Clinton knew ahead of time that the plant occurred. But it's not as far a stretch as the next update:
Now a story of possible planting of questions. This goes back to her senate race.
Three days after Hillary Clinton's campaign was forced to admit it had planted a question at an Iowa campaign event, an eagle-eyed tipster noted that this wasn't the first time the former First Lady's camp arranged for a friendly voice to lob a softball question.
In announcing her Senate run in 1999, MSNBC reported that "responding to a planted question at a Teachers Union event [Clinton] made it clear she is in the race for the US Senate."
Clinton's aides reacted to the news of the most recent rigged question by saying "this is not standard policy and will not be repeated again."
It's hard to go on anything more than an assertion by Andrea Mitchell (not necessarily the model standard of a reporter, by the way) that the question was prearranged. Yet this is supposed to be definitive evidence that Clinton has been practicing the art of answering planted questions for a long time.
I'm not the biggest fan of Hillary Clinton by any stretch, and I am almost certainly going to be supporting else in the primary. But these attacks on Clinton are getting out of hand and are detracting from the real issues one could take with her campaign, whether it's the issues (her hawkishness of foreign policy, for example) or the style (why does Clinton seemingly evade hard questions?). Instead, the media, the candidates (particularly Edwards) and Kossacks are racing towards the bottom to make hay out of an incident that is amplifying a negative aspect of the Clinton campaign - but in a dishonest manner. Maybe that's enough for people, but it should be a warning to us that the Democratic candidate - no matter who it is - is not going to get a fair shake from the traditional media.