HRC's Assassination Gaffe

I am glad the hooplah concerning HRC's assassination gaffe has died down. My original reaction upon hearing of it pretty much mirrored the tabloid headlines, but I now think that her words were inartful rather than sinister.

Her explanation that the Kennedys were on her mind since Teddy Kennedy's recent diagnosis rang hollow, because it was well before that, back in early March, that she told Time's Richard Stengel that "[w]e all remember the great tragedy of Bobby Kennedy being assassinated in June in L.A." Having watched her say that line to Stengel, however, I believe she genuinely felt the tragedy of that assassination. It then struck me that she wasn't trying to suggest that Obama might meet RFK's fate; if anything, I believe she instead sees herself as something of an RFK figure.

A number of commenters argued that her bringing up RFK's assassination was suggestively sinister by pointing out that, if she had just wanted to reference long primary races, she could have used Teddy's run in 1980. That argument, however, is not very well thought through - comparing yourself to someone who was seen as costing their party the election hardly justifies your staying in the race. Teddy Kennedy's insurgent run was blamed for Jimmy Carter's loss in 1980, just as Ronald Reagan's run was blamed for Ford's loss in 1976. The only suitable examples of drawn-out primaries are ones where the ultimate victor prevailed (or might have prevailed, had he lived) in the general election, e.g., Bill Clinton and RFK.

Furthermore, I think HRC feels a certain affinity for RFK and truly sees what happened as a tragedy. Both of them are/were hard-as-nails fighters. As did RFK, Hillary entered the election already famous and with the mixed blessing of carrying on a political legacy. Both had been the very visible right-hand person to charismatic presidents; both only found their political voice well after beginning their presidential campaigns. Both were portrayed as and seen by many to be calculating opportunists who subordinated principled positions to expediency. As HRC has in Obama, RFK had in Eugene McCarthy an effete liberal competitor who had taken an early stand against the war and whose surprising early primary victories were due to the grass roots campaigning of anti-war college students and other activists from around the country who traveled to early primary states in support their candidate's campaign. McCarthy had the support of the same demographic that now supports Obama, as RFK had HRC's.

I believe HRC had a blind spot when she made those comments; she may just not have seen that RFK's assassination would be taken as a veiled reference to Obama, and that's because she is so much more like RFK than is Obama. Of course, even if I'm right, she would have been pilloried even worse than she was if she had tried publicly to compare herself to RFK. In any case, I wish her better luck than he had.