Campaign Stop

I heard a story on NPR this morning about a campaign stop on Hillary Clinton's tour of Iowa where a waitress complained that "Nobody got left a tip". I noticed that as I was writing this, a note had been added on the NPR site that the campaign not only paid, but also left a $100 tip.

Now, I have no idea what really happened, but it seems to me that just because Hillary has lunch somewhere and meets a mother (the aforementioned waitress) that has to work two jobs to make ends meet, that doesn't give her the right to insert that individual into her campaign speeches and take advantage of the story.

And I can't understand how the subject who obviously had contact with Hillary to relay her story, could have failed to know about the tip. Further, I would think that Hillary would go out of her way to make sure that the person who's story she hijacked for political gain would at least have something positive to say about the meeting, other than, she's glad that she got her 15 minutes of fame.

Now call me crazy, but this smacks of the classic scene from Primary Colors where the character of Jack Stanton, rumored to be symbolic of Bill Clinton and played by John Travolta, leaves a campaign meeting where he told a tearful story about an illiterate uncle, only to reveal that he has no uncle.

The message that I got from the movie was that the political character of Jack Stanton was willing to lie in order to further his political agenda and that the ends justified the means. Likewise the character of Susan Stanton, ostensibly Hillary Clinton, was as politically ruthless as her husband. Forgiving even her husband's extra-marital affairs for the cause...

So if you believe that the roman à clef story was a realistic portrayal of the Clinton's' political strategy then it appears to me that it's politics as usual on the Clinton campaign trail. Only this time someone went back and dug a little deeper. Now the Clinton spin machine is hard at work to counter the bad publicity and I have to wonder, will we experience the same type of ends that we did the last time a "Stanton" plied their political means?

I'm also wondering how long before Hillary starts claiming that NPR is part of right-wing media conspiracy to discredit her.