17 May 2014

’30 days in hospital?’: Hillary called on to reveal all

Have we seen the opening punch thrown (and landed) in the campaign that will decide who becomes the next US president?

We’ve been feeling a bit reluctant to wade into covering that election, more than two years ahead of time. We thought we’d bide our time and consider the issues dividing the US now. After all, there’ll be a world of campaigning to cover a little further down the track.

And then along comes Karl Rove. Cue a flurry of conservative shadow play, in which powerful and nasty things are not quite said, but hinted at.

The wise and experienced of the C4 Washington bureau stroke their beards and recall John Kerry in 2004: the innuendo around his wartime service and what did or didn’t happen in a swift boat river patrol in Vietnam. The attacks, both covert and overt, set out to cast doubt in the minds of voters over his character.

At that time, I was south east Asia correspondent for another British broadcaster, and found myself summarily dispatched to Ho Chi Minh city, onto a boat on the Mekong Delta to vox pop surprised Vietnamese seniors fishing and living by the muddy banks about whether they remembered any Americans zipping along in jet-boats fifty years ago.

It was a butterfly flapping its wings moment, all the way from Washington DC to the Mekong, which of course was exactly what John Kerry’s opponents wanted.

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The reverberative power of suggestion is exactly what one might imagine Karl Rove had in mind last week when speaking to a conference in LA. It’s reported that he asserted, a number of times, that voters needed to know more about the injuries sustained by Hillary Clinton when she fell and suffered concussion in December 2012. She was officially diagnosed with a blood clot, for which she was treated.

But in the jousting words of Karl Rove, it turned into: “30 days in the hospital? And when she reappears, she’s wearing glasses that are only for people who have traumatic brain injury? We need to know what’s up with that.”

And that’s about all it took to seed some key early notions and prompt some rapid reaction discussion panels to take up the cause. They animatedly questioned is Hillary up to the job?! She’ll be 69 come 2016?! And can we believe what her family tells us?!

Mr Rove has denied using the term brain damaged and Hillary’s husband, Bill, supportively said she still runs rings around him. Ha Ha.

But no-one’s laughing too loudly. If that was the opening punch, it’s going to be a dirty fight.

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