The media mob was slow to pick up the story—Sinbad jokes had been circulating for weeks on Hillary's press plane without anyone following up. But Clinton finally fell victim to what might be called "pattern coverage." For years, Hillary has had occasional problems with the truth when attacked. (The firing of the staffers who ran the White House Travel Office in 1993 was ridiculously overcovered, but an independent probe later proved she was lying when she claimed she hadn't ordered it.) All it takes is a few such incidents for the press to identify a dreaded pattern, into which it then fits subsequent stories. No pattern, no frenzy.

The Tuzla Tale has already had repercussions. Clinton was disappointed that the feeding frenzy over Obama's relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright didn't destroy his candidacy. It's her best hope of winning the nomination, so she tried to reignite the story. But her latest approach to bashing Obama only reinforced the impression that her recent setbacks have left her desperate. She stopped by for a cozy interview with billionaire publisher Richard Mellon Scaife, the right-winger who commissioned the most hate-filled anti-Clinton stories of the 1990s. For her to seek help from Scaife in publicizing Obama's supposed tolerance of hate speech sets a new standard in campaign chutzpah. Scaife wrote (or at least paid for) the book on personal destruction. It's like the bloodied kids in the new Owen Wilson movie "Drillbit Taylor" asking the bully who has tormented them to go beat up some other kid. Classy.

The coda to the Tuzla Tale was the way Hillary tried to defuse it. Where the late New York mayor Fiorello LaGuardia said amiably, "When I make a mistake, it's a beaut!" or Obama confessed to being "boneheaded" in dealing with shady donor Tony Rezko, Hillary said sarcastically: "This proves I'm human, which for some people is a revelation." It was all there—the pain, the resentment and the sense of what it would be like to spend four or eight years listening to her respond to criticism as president.

© 2008