Everyone’s abuzz over Hillary Clinton saying she is staying in the race just in case Barack Obama gets assassinated. Or, something like that:
“My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. I don’t understand it,” she said, dismissing calls to drop out.
Here’s the video:
A very angry John Aravosis has the blow-by-blow of the story breaking and the various reactions and counter-reactions as they played out on television.
Marc Ambinder notes that the part about Bill Clinton isn’t even true — that he essentially had it wrapped up in March — and that Gary Hart and numerous other frontrunners who fell apart late without getting murdered would have been better examples.
TIME’s objective journalist Karen Tumulty calls the comments “very strange and tasteless” and points out Clinton said something very similar in March. Big Tent Democrat/Armando, the Hugh Hewitt of pro-Clinton bloggers, uses the fact that nobody made a big deal about it then as evidence that it’s not a big deal now.
AllahPundit, who thinks this kills (no pun intended) the idea of Hillary as VP, notes that Robert Kennedy, Jr. is a Clinton supporter and has issued a statement that it would be “a mistake for people to take offense.”
I’m with RFK, Jr. and Armando on this one. Yes, it was an impolitic thing to say. And, goodness, you think she’d have learned from Mike Huckabee’s example. But, rather clearly, the context was “Hey, sometimes things happen” rather than “Hey, I’ve got a chance — he could get hisself shot!”
There are plenty of reasons to want Hillary Clinton to go away. This, though, isn’t one of them.
