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HenchPAC NewsFor days Hillary Clinton's media fan club has been bemoaning her Senate opponent Rick Lazio's aggressiveness in last Wednesday's debate, especially the moment when he "invaded her space" to demand that she sign a pledge to ban soft money from the balance of their race.
The confrontation, the pundits now tell us, showed that Lazio was a bully. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd compared the Long Island Republican to an angry husband, who was "yelling" and "screaming" with "his eyes bulging" and "his veins popping." Others in the press called Lazio's debate gambit "McCarthy-like."
But if Dowd and her journalistic brethren had done their homework, they'd know that when Lazio staged the dramatic confrontation, he had inadvertently lifted a page right out of Hillary Clinton's own debate primer.
Hillary's Lazio moment came during her husband's bid for a fifth term as Arkansas' governor. His Democratic primary opponent, Tom McRae, the head of Little Rock's Rockefeller Foundation, had called a press conference to complain that Governor Clinton was dodging debates.
As McRae rattled off the list of Clinton's failures in office, a woman standing in the back of the room shouted, "Get off it, Tom." It was Hillary Clinton, who had shown up unannounced to heckle her husband's opponent.
"Do you really want an answer, Tom," Hillary hollered? "Do you really want a response from Bill when you know he's in Washington doing work for the state?"
Then, in a moment mirroring the one where Lazio pulled his soft money pledge from his pocket, Mrs. Clinton pulled a four page prepared statement from her handbag.
The late investigative reporter George Carpozi described the confrontation in his 1994 book "Clinton Confidential":
"McRae, a gentle man with impeccable credentials..... stared, mouth agape, at Hillary, who stepped forward attired in a houndstooth tweed blazer, turtleneck, and pearl earrings. The huge Clinton campaign button pinned to her sweater was a dead giveaway that she was there to perform for the TV cameras."
Hillary began reading from a Rockefeller Foundation document, which in fact praised her husband to the hilt and sounded like a point-by-point rebuttal to the very criticisims McRae had raised."
Then Hillary got down and dirty.
"I went through all your (Rockefeller Foundation) reports," Mrs. Clinton hectored McRae as the stunned audience looked on, "because I've been really disappointed with you as a candidate -- and I've been really disappointed in you as a person, Tom."
What Hillary didn't tell the room was that much of the report's praise for her husband originated with Hillary herself, since she had served on the foundation's board.
After the dramatic face-off, a reporter asked Hillary how she knew her husband's opponent was about to hold a press conference. "I might have heard about it," she said, at a luncheon she attended earlier that day.
And her talking points?
"Oh, I had brought them with me to the Sertoma Club," to use in her luncheon address.
Did her husband know she planned to confront McRae, the reporter wondered?
"Oh, no," Mrs. Clinton said, explaining that McRae's criticism had prompted her spontaneous outburst.
That was a lie, of course, as Washington Post reporter David Maraniss revealed in his own 1995 Clinton biography "First in His Class."
"It had the feel of a spontaneous encounter, the proud wife defending her man. In fact, it had been scripted. At a strategy meeting the day before, the Clinton team had decided that McRae needed to be confronted. 'We have to take this guy on!" Hillary said, and then she went out and did it."
Needless to say, the Arkansas press wasted no time worrying about whether Hillary Clinton had bullied the mild-mannered Tom McRae or had invaded his space.
HENCH adds: The difference of course, is that A) Lazio is running against Hillary, she was not running against Tom McRae, her lying HUSBAND was. B) Lazio didn't use a bogus, prepared speech that used his own quotes to support himself. He gave her a simple document to sign. C) Lazio doesn't have the baggage of being a documented liar for the last 30 years like she has, or the baggage of being a court-proven liar like her HUSBAND has.
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