The following report is from ABCNew's Eloise Harper:
A Heated Exchange for Hillary
ABCNews' Eloise Harper reports: After fielding many questions ranging from mental health care to veteran affairs at a Town Hall Meeting in Hampton, NH, Senator Hillary Clinton received a heated question about Iraq. A woman who had traveled from New York asked Sen. Clinton if she had read the report given to her in 2002 on intelligence and the Iraq war.
Clinton said she had been briefed on the report, and the woman screamed back, "Did you read it?!" Notably uncomfortable, the Senator repeated that she had been briefed. This exchange went back and forth about three times.
The woman sat down and Clinton explained, "If I had known then what I know now, I never would have voted to give this President the authority." Clinton also said she believed she was giving the President the authority to send U.N. inspectors to Iraq.
When Clinton finished the answer, the woman continued to scream but was drowned out by applause for the Senator. The woman was escorted out of the building.
http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalradar/2007/04/heated_meeting_.html
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2 comments:
Hi Cosmo!
I was on the other side of this lady. Senator Clinton said "How about one more question?" and it was this lady. She was definitely one of the craziest looking ppl I have ever seen at a rally, and I have been to a lot of them. Wearing a trench coat and clutching a note pad. I wonder if her tinfoil hat was in the pocket of the trenchcoat.
Anyhow, love the blog and keep up the great work!
Lance
I dunno; she wasn't the epitome of cool and poise, but she wasn't particularly crazy-looking either (at least not when she was efficiently but unforcefully hustled past me), just angry, and, unlike New Hampshirites, unfamiliar with the appropriate ways of channeling that anger toward politicians. Appearance and bearing aside, there was nothing tin-foily about her question, and we shouldn't hold the fact that she was from New York (quite possibly through no fault of her own) against her.
Still, she apparently did a pretty good job on pressing Clinton to answer the question. Her question was, in a nutshell, "Did you read the 92-page NIE report that Senator Bob Graham begged every senator to read before they cast their votes?" Hillary refused to directly answer, saying simply, "I was fully briefed," and shifting the topic. I couldn't hear the woman's interruptions, but it wasn't hard to guess why Clinton kept pausing and repeating, "I was fully briefed," and once, with a creditable affectation of incomprehension, "I answered your question!"
Well, no, Senator, you didn't, actually. Yes or no questions pretty much call for yes or no answers. This was no exception to that rule. Still, your response left no doubt as to what the true answer was, or as to whether you have any interest in picking up ex-maverick John McCain's discarded "Straight-Talker" mantle.
This does tend to make me turn the volume knob way down on the "maybe I oughta give Hillary serious consideration" portion of my interior monologue.
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