Hillary Clinton has been taking her “quiet moments” campaign theme to heart lately, laying low as Donald Trump’s foibles dominate the airwaves.
But even when she is clearly reining herself in, taking no chances at disrupting the torrent of Trump-centric news, she still can’t go too long without “embellishing the truth.” In her most recent campaign commercial, the aforementioned “Quiet Moments,” for example, she makes a very strange claim about her involvement in providing free healthcare to needy children.
The transcript:
“It’s always been about kids. And when millions could not get health care, this first lady worked with Democrats and Republicans to fix it, creating the Children’s Health Insurance Program ‘so that every child gets the health care they deserve.’ Now 8 million kids are covered. That’s the kind of leader she is — and the kind of president she will be.”
Here’s the problem. CHIP or (sCHIP) is well-known as a hallmark of former Sen. Ted Kennedy’s tenure. He and Republican Orrin Hatch led the push to pass CHIP in a divided Congress. Then First Lady Hillary Clinton wasn’t in the legislative loop. Clinton and her husband may have helped promote the program, but in 1998, well after the bill had passed Congress.
The best the Washington Post‘s fact checker could come up with? A single transcript of a single discussion between Ted Kennedy and Hillary Clinton. One. But she still counts it as one of her “Seven Biggest Achievements.”
Of course, Clinton is no stranger to fudging the facts on her resume. Here are a few more of her “biggest” accomplishments that never happened.
1. Climbing Back Up From Post-White House Poverty. Clinton claimed in an interview that she and Bill were “dead broke” when the left the White House. Hillary Clinton must have her own unique definition of “dead broke,” because she moved straight from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. to a $3 million Chappaqua mansion. Soon after, she and her husband were raking in hundreds of thousands in speaking fees and book royalties. Not quite the rags-to-riches Cinderella tale.
2. Braving Sniper Fire in Sarajevo. During her last campaign for president, Clinton claimed that she exited an aircraft in Bosnia to a hail of bullets in the early ’90s, forcing her and her entourage to duck and cover before escaping in a military vehicle. Footage of the event shows Clinton calmly waving to her welcoming committee, automatic weapons notably silent.
3. The Child of Immigrant Grandparents. In fairness, this isn’t Clinton’s accomplishment, but she trots it out as a qualification when talking to immigrant families. According to Hillary, all of her grandparents came to American from faraway lands to make a better life for themselves—the true American immigrant experience. It turns out while one of her grandparents immigrated, one was actually born in that far-away land of Scranton, Pa. The two others were from Illinois.
4. The Few, the Proud, the Marine (and NASA!) Rejects. Late last year, she claimed that, after finishing law school, she tried to join the Marines and was roundly rejected because she was a girl (and, at 26, old, to boot). Not even New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd believed this one, noting that there was no way that Clinton, then serious with her boyfriend Bill Clinton, would leave a “budding political star” to sign up for military service. Hillary’s friends said that they remembered her talking to a recruiter, but only to test whether the military had patriarchal leanings. She also claimed that NASA rejected her in 1962.
5. Stellar Secretary of State. Clinton uses her tenure as Secretary of State to boost her credibility on foreign policy. But when asked what she accomplished in her years as the head of America’s foreign service, she said her greatest milestone was publishing her own biography, Hard Choices. When reporters asked State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki to name Clinton’s top achievement, she passed the buck: “I am certain that those who were here at the time, who worked hard on that effort, could point out one.”
Now, of course, we tease. Hillary Clinton has had plenty of real accomplishments. She’s made millions marketing herself as inspirational! She managed to marry a man who worked hard to achieve power. She’s really good at overspending on pantsuits. She won a Grammy!
Certainly, that should be plenty…right?
