From the Times’ version of the story that is everywhere:
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton defended staying in the Democratic nominating contest on Friday by pointing out that her husband had not wrapped up the nomination until June 1992, adding, “We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California.”
Her remarks were met with quick criticism from the campaign of Senator Barack Obama, and within hours of making them Mrs. Clinton expressed regret, saying, “The Kennedys have been much on my mind the last days because of Senator Kennedy,” referring to the recent diagnosis of Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s brain tumor. She added, “And I regret that if my referencing that moment of trauma for our entire nation and in particular the Kennedy family was in any way offensive.”
No apology to the Obamas, as Olbermann and others have pointed out.
Calculating and contemptible (which was my first reaction, and which I’ve edited and elaborated since), or merely outrageously, regrettably clumsy? I have a hard time believing it was a mistake. She is a professional politician who knows exactly what she is saying (and, as the AP version points out, it’s not the first time she’s made this “historical observation”). If she was indeed simply trying to make a historical observation, and has “been around” as long as she says, she knows she could have chosen other Democratic contestants who ran longer than RFK and were not assassinated (as this otherwise forgiving blogger/columnist points out). Was she letting slip that she intends to stick around long enough to see if something catastrophic happens to Obama? Was she trying to cement those fears and doubts in voters’ heads - fears that are already very much on their minds? Her explanation, that because of Ted Kennedy’s brain cancer diagnosis the Kennedy family has been on her mind, would have been a lot more plausible had she not - as noted above - invoked this very same “historical observation” in March.
As reprehensibly as she has been campaigning, she long ago forfeited the benefit of the doubt.
