Recently, Hillary Rodham Clinton, the female contender for the US-Democratic Party nomination has been saying things that have cast her honesty into doubt. This is a major departure from the high point she begun from. Clinton has reportedly deliberately exaggerated her profile in order to create an impression that she is more experienced than her more charismatic opponent Barack Obama. Recently on the campaign trail, she claimed to have come under sniper fire after landing at an airport in Bosnia. Said Hillary Clinton: “There was supposed to be some kind of ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base”. However, evidence from those present suggests otherwise. Moreover, video footage of the event that took place in 1996, which has been broadcast on television around the world and posted on You Tube, shows her walking from the plane and even greeting a young girl. She has since tried to down play her tall tale. Obama’s campaign spokesman, Tommy Vietor, has described it as one of the several exaggerations that Senator Clinton has tried to use to showcase herself as having superior foreign policy experience in comparison to Obama. What is amazing to some people, however, is that Mrs Clinton would seek to insinuate that, being a wife of a former president which includes many foreign trips, amounts to foreign policy experience. The anti-Obama machine has also deliberately tried to falsely portray him as anti- American by claiming that he is secretly a Muslim. Following the September 11 attacks in Washington and New York, being Muslim is deemed anti-American amongst many Americans. Many websites and blogs are awash with bloggers trying to find all sorts of evidence to suggest that Obama is Muslim. They have jumped on the fact that part of his childhood was spent in Muslim Indonesia to reinforce the “Muslim amongst us theory”. The photo of him in traditional Somali dress is also seen in this light. We can also remember during the campaigns in South Carolina when former President Bill Clinton tried to insinuate that Obama can not win because he is black. This was calculated to scare black voters from choosing Obama as the Democratic nominee in the November polls. In the past, the Clintons have been associated with noble causes when it comes to black-American issues. Many people will be and have been wondering how they are now willing to play any trick in the dirty politics guide book against a black candidate. Is it a case of Realpolitick as political scientists would call it, or were they not genuine in their past efforts towards black people’s advancement? It now seems that their past interest in supporting black causes was after all, also simply politics. They, one can argue, saw the Afro-Americans as their constituency which they were supposed to monopolise in American politics. The emergence of a strong black candidate has threatened their decades-long project that some say started in the law school library of Yale University, where they first met and decided to rule America. Thus tall tales, like the recent one about her 1996 trip to Bosnia, cannot come as a surprise to those that have keenly watched the political paths of the Clintons from the governor’s mansion in Little Rock, Arkansas, to the White House and later the senate and to the current campaign. Many people who thought distortions and deliberate untruths were a preserve of African political demagogues have had to do a re-think of their views. Even in America it is possible. Definitely, winning and realising one’s ambition is so important that even people, once thought of being beyond the business of telling tall tales, go ahead and do the unthinkable. What is clear from all this, is that Obama’s momentum and amazing campaign has driven the Clintons to a precipice. Their political dream is moving on shaky ground thanks to a “black upstart”, hence the need to pull out every dirty trick in the book. Contact: frank2kagabo@yahoo.com
