Hillary under seige

The American media were full of Hillary Rodham Clinton last fortnight, subjecting her to a personal inquisition on two issues: her laughterand her evasiveness. She has the world¿s best laugh, Bill Clinton had once said about his wife. The media were amused, enchanted, baffled, peeved and irritated. All because Clinton laughed. Laughter of a newsy kind that provoked a lot of derision,and delight too. On a recent Sunday she appeared on five chat showson the same day and laughed through them.

But a measly adjective does not do justice to the laughter of a woman who is most likely to enter the White House as the nation¿s first woman President. Someone called it a cackle implying she is a witch. Soon an entire industry cropped up around her laughter, scrutinizing, analyzing, interpreting, dissecting, annotating. Jon Stewart pieced together clips of her five Sunday shows and ran them on his Comedy Central network describing her laughter as creepy and delayed. Media coverage thus far included only Clinton¿s hairstyles, pantsuits, makeup, and cleavage. Matt Drudge posted a sound clip of it on his Drudge Report website and Sean Hannity, host of the Fox News weekend program, Hannity¿s America doubted whether Clinton¿s laughter was presidential.

The New York Times went to town with a clutch of articles parsing her enigmatic laughter and adjudicating her performance at the NBC-sponsored Democratic convention at Philadelphia a week ago, setting the pace for the multimedia army of editorial writers, columnists, news analysts, TV and radio commentators and the entire universe of bloggers, who picked whatever adjective they thought fitted the New York senator.

We begin with The New York Times first because of its iconic stature and because Hillary is a New Yorker. The paper¿s columnist Patrick Healy recalled the history of Hillary¿s guffaws and thought it was a hearty belly laugh that she broke into answering reporters¿ questions on abortion laws. Reporters thought that they had missed a joke. Calling it The Cackle, Healy felt that, at that moment, the laugh had seemed like the equivalent of an eye-roll. Healy, who repeatedly used the word cackle as a metaphor, thinks Clinton used laughter as a substitute for argument. The entire article was devoted to the Clinton giggle.

But Jeralyn Merrit writing in the Huffington Post believed that Healy has been doing hit pieces on Democratic candidates for years while giving Rudy Giuliani a pass. A baffled FrankRich, Timesop-ed columnist, thought that, however sincere, this humanizing touch seems as clumsily stage-managed as the Gore¿s dramatic convention kiss, a reference to Al Gore kissing his wife on the stage in a bid to humanize his image at a Democratic convention. This was the reason, Maureen Dowd (another NYT piece on Hillary) believed, why Hillary was laughing a lot now "to soften her image as she confidently knocks her male opponents out of the way."

Since then the sound of Hillary¿s laughter, accompanied by urgent analyses thereof, has been echoing from the tarpits of the Internet to the lofty peaks of the major mainstream media, wrote Hendrik Hertzberger in America¿s most prestigious magazine The NewYorker. Howard Kurtz wrote in The Washington Post, ¿Suddenly, everyone wanted a piece of the punch line, examining whether The Laugh met some vaguely defined standard of acceptability.¿

But at the Philadelphia debate moderated by Tim Russet and Brian Williams of Fox News, Hillary clearly fumbled and faltered. She did expect an attack but was not prepared for the intensity from her own colleagues. Everybody vs. Hillary, cried an NYT caption for a Gail Collins¿ article. The debate really looked like six men against one woman. Russet and Williams steered the debate negatively, joining her tormentors in challenging her. Collins said Hillary Clinton stood on a stage for two hours Tuesday night, being yelled at by six men. ¿She took it all and came out the other end in one piece.¿ Not true. Clinton emerged shattered and bruised. When she prevaricated on Iran, The Wall Street Journal said, ¿It¿s impossible to know what she feels about anything.¿

Barack Obama accused her of changing positions whenever it was politically convenient. ¿Right now what we need is honesty with the American people¿, he said. John Edwards, often overshadowing Obama, attacked Clinton¿s credentials and credibility and pointed out that she defended a broken system that is corrupt in Washington D.C. ¿The American people deserve a President that they know will tell them the truth and won¿t sayone thing one time and something different at a different time.¿Clinton was evasive and shifty and seemed she deserved the attack. She changed her stance on driver¿s licenses for illegal immigrants, sounded supportive of Bush plans for Iran and vague on social security.

Guardian correspondent kept a count of the punches delivered to Clinton at the Philadelphia debate: "At the end of the two-hour event, the scorecard looked like this: former senator JohnEdwards had criticized Ms Clinton eight times; Mr Obama, six; New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, twice; and senators Chris Dodd andJoe Biden, once each. Mr Richardson also once defended Ms Clinton against attacks that he thought were getting a little "personal".
 
Media voices became more strident in the context of the impending Iowa primary in January. She is running second to her Democratic rival Obama in Iowa which is the first state to hold a primary. Washington correspondent of UK¿s Indpendent Leonard Doyle thought that defeat in Iowa would be a serious blow and may explain why Clinton is using humor to deflect criticism rather than the withering ripostes she is known for.

There were also references to doubts whether rules of debate had changed because Hillary is a woman. Adam Nagourney and Patrick Healy reporting for NYT thought that Clinton had taken pains to not come across as complaining or suggesting she felt victimized. She felt it was natural because she was the frontrunner. The 1984 vice-presidential candidate Geraldine Ferrao suggested that Edwards and media would never attack Obama for two hours the way they attacked Clinton. Edwards later denied in an interview that the male candidates had ganged up against Clinton.

There is no doubt that media obsession with her personal traits is unseemly and reflects a long-standing American preoccupation with trivia. But the coverage on the debate in Philadelphia rightly emphasized the need for Clinton to abjure equivocation and regard the debates as rehearsals for honest performance as the first woman President. Otherwise, in the event of her election this record of evasion and prevarication is likely to demand heavy political price. As a presidential aspirant, Clinton has to be less sensitive and more forthcoming.

The immediate fallout of her Philadelphia debacle is the shrinking of her 30-point lead over Obama in October to 19 points now, accordingto CNN/Opinion Research poll.