Experience has been the watchword of Hillary's campaign. As she fights to explain the Bosnian story, I'm struck by the way that both popular explanations for her behavior are inadequate. Lying is damning, certainly, but seems to strain credulity. Once, perhaps, but Hillary was confronted and only retracted half her story. She's too skilled to not know the second half would come back to bite her. Misstatements? Not three times over the course of over three months.
I propose a third possibility: Hillary has had a decade - and perhaps several decades - with her eye on the prize: she wants to be President. Faced with the need to present a narrative for her selection as a superior candidate, cognitive dissonance has literally changed her memories.
First, was this a slip up on a single occasion? Absolutely not.
As CBS reports, Clinton has repeatedly claimed she was in immediate danger or under fire when landing in Bosnia:
She claimed she misspoke and was sleep deprived, but CBS News has found several times in the past few months Senator Clinton used the Bosnia trip to try to show her international experience, reports Sharyl Attkisson. Clinton did so in Iowa in December, Texas in February and also last week.
In a March 17 speech in Washington, Clinton said of the Bosnia trip: "I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base."
"I was also told that the greeting ceremony had been moved away from the tarmac but that there was this eight-year-old girl and I said, 'Well, I, I can't, I can't rush by her, I've got to at least greet her,'' Clinton said. "So I greeted her, I took her stuff and I left. Now that's my memory of it."
Clinton told CNN last week, "There was no greeting ceremony, and we basically were told to run to our cars. Now, that is what happened."
There are, as I see it, about three possible reasons Clinton could repeatedly lie about the events in Bosnia.
(1) She was lying for gain. Certainly the most damning possibility - an intentional lie - it would seem to be the most unlikely. News crews are everywhere; she had to know that meet and greet arrival ceremony was on tape. In her shoes, if she had a clear-eyed vision of what actually happened, it seems like she would have to know she'd be called on it. Maybe she thought the spreading of the lie would get much wider coverage than the retraction or the coverage of the truth, but I'm pretty skeptical.
(2) She was tired and 'misspoke'. This also strains credulity; not because the campaign trail isn't arduous and will strain people. Surely. But when she tells the same story in Iowa - at the very start of the campaign - and in Texas, and then again in Pennsylvania, it becomes very difficult to believe that she can make that mistake each time. And if she did, it tells me that she's having a hard time enduring the rigors of the campaign trail. If the campaign is that hard, how will the Presidency be? If the phone call comes at 3AM, will she have the fortitude to exercise good judgment even if she is tired? The presidency isn't an easy job. I don't think the reason everyone seems to leave it having gone gray-haired is only because of the time that passes.
(3) She misremembers. One possible thing - since her errant account was repeated - was that she actually remembers things being different. Let's explore this one a bit more in depth:
Clinton's response in direct confrontation is problematic. See, she was confronted by CBS about her account; she explained it, and even her longer explanation is wrong, because she didn't see the whole clip - so even her explanation was a lie intentional or not, but it was false):
"I was also told that the greeting ceremony had been moved away from the tarmac but that there was this eight-year-old girl and I said, 'Well, I, I can't, I can't rush by her, I've got to at least greet her,'' Clinton said. "So I greeted her, I took her stuff and I left. Now that's my memory of it."
Once again her memory doesn't match CBS News videotape, Attkisson reports. She and her daughter Chelsea lingered on the tarmac to greet U.S. military officials, took photos, and then walked to the armored vehicle where she did, eventually, duck and enter.
I don't see Clinton falling back on another lie that could be verified as false when confronted with a lie that has been verified as false, because that's a recipe for being dead wrong a second time.
But she gave a false explanation even when confronted with the original falsehood.
I think we need to consider the possibility that Hillary wasn't tired, per se; not three separate times. In fact, that's her excuse now, when presented with the tapes, but that she actually believed she was telling the truth.
This leads me to talk about cognitive dissonance. It's worth a read, but I'll cite a description of one particular study:
In a later experiment Aronson and Carlsmith (1963) viewed cognitive justification to forced compliance in children.
The experimenter would question the child on a set of toys to gauge which toys the children liked the most and which they found the least tempting. The experimenter then chose a toy that the child really liked, put them in a room with it, and left the room. Upon leaving the room the experimenter told half the children that there would be a severe punishment if they played with the toy and told the other half that there would be a moderate punishment.
Later, when the punishment, whether severe or moderate, was removed, the children in the moderate punishment condition were less likely to play with the toy, even though now it had no repercussion.
When questioned, the children in the moderate condition expressed more of a disinterest in the toy than would be expected towards a toy that they had initially ranked high in interest. Alternatively, the desirability of the toy went up for the children in the severe punishment condition.
This study laid out the effect of over-justification and insufficient justification on cognition.
In over-justification, the personal beliefs and attitudes of the person do not change because they have a good external reason for their actions. The children threatened with the severe punishment had a good external reasoning for not playing with the toy because they knew that they would be badly punished for it. However, they still wanted the toy, so once the punishment was removed they were more likely to play with it. Conversely, the children who would get the moderate punishment displayed insufficient justification because they had to justify to themselves why they did not want to play with the toy since the external motivator, the degree of punishment, was not strong enough by itself. As a result, they convinced themselves that the toy was not worth playing with, which is why even when the punishment was removed they still did not play with the toy.
My theory is that Hillary, in her need to justify her run for the Presidency, and believing that she is the best person to lead the country, has had her mind manufacture events - out of real events - which support her belief. Classic cognitive dissonance at work: her firm belief does not agree with the facts. Eventually, her subconscious got around to changing the facts.
I have never really bought into the intentional lie - too easily contradicted. I have never bought into the "misstatement" - it was misrepresented too often, and she would never persist with a misstatement when confronted with half of it. But she did.
The explanation which remains is that she thought she was being truthful. Whether that's better or worse is an exercise for the reader.
(crossposted to mydd)