Hillary Clinton's campaign rollout has been the gaffe machine that keeps on giving. One gaffe in particular was so obvious that it masked an even more ludicrous one.
On Sunday, several people, including yours truly, the Twitter curators at Twitchy, David Knowles at Bloomberg, but almost no one else in the establishment press, noticed that Mrs. Clinton's campaign announcement press release told America that "she's fought children and their families all her career." That gaffe was so glaring that a far worse one which would have led readers to believe that she has fought for them even longer than she has been alive has, from what I can tell, been completely ignored.
To fully appreciate how bad it is, let's go to the current revised bio for Mrs. Clinton's description of her mother's apparently genuinely difficult early years (bolds are mine throughout this post):
Hillary’s mother, Dorothy, had a tough childhood. She was abandoned by her parents as a young child and shipped off to live with relatives who didn’t want her. By age 14, Dorothy knew the only way she’d get by was to support herself, and she started working as a housekeeper and babysitter while she went through high school. Her mother’s experience sparked in Hillary a lifelong commitment to championing the needs of children.
Her own childhood was very different. Her parents built a stable middle class life.
Let's give Mrs. Clinton the benefit of the doubt here, and assume that she really meant to say that she's "fought for children and their families all her career" at the end of the contested sentence.
Fine. That still doesn't do anything to remedy that sentence's preceding text, as captured here and seen below:
The "corrected" sentence would read as follows (HT to a commenter at my home blog; bold is mine):
From her mother's own childhood — in which she was abandoned by her parents — to her work going door-to-door for the Children's Defense Fund to her battling to create the Children's Health Insurance Program, she's fought for children and families all her career.
The bio's narrative about her mother, whose full name was Dorothy Emma Howell, indicates that she was abandoned in her early teens, and perhaps even earlier than that.
Dorothy Emma Howell was born in 1919. Hillary Clinton, then Hillary Rodham, was born in 1947, when her mother was 28.
Thus, Mrs. Clinton's original bio told us that she "fought for children and families" for at least 14 years, and perhaps as many as 20, before she was even born! (Ms. Howell's Wikipedia entry indicates that she was "sent on a train" when "Dorothy was eight ... to live with their paternal grandparents.")
Therefore, Mrs. Clinton, who is now 67, has "fought for children and families" for over 80 long years, going all the way back to the Great Depression, or perhaps even before the stock market crash which began it. We can now begin to understand why she sometimes seems quite fatigued.
... if a Republican presidential candidate's staff got this sloppy with so much time to prepare, the press would already be commenting on his or her campaign's "disarrary" and "poor organization."
Now that the full extent of Mrs. Clinton's announcement gaffe is clear, the news and general media double standard could not be more obvious. A Republican or conservative making this kind of mistake would be fodder for never-ending late-night comedy show jokes — or at least jokes that wouldn't end until the candidate got laughed out of contention.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
