I ONCE saw a beautiful woman, known in Boston for her modesty and decorum, dance on top of a white piano in the bar of an Austrian ski resort. I said to her: "Wait until I tell your friends back home about this." "But," she said, "no one would believe you." And she was right. No one ever has.
This came to mind when America's political campaign entered a new and more negative phase last week. There are certain people about whom the public will never believe certain things, no matter how much mud is thrown. Even if it turns out they did take a turn on top of a white piano once, no one will believe that they are, in any way or in any form, piano top dancers.
The attacks against John McCain indicating that he really is a hypocrite when he rails against special interests and lobbyists are not going to be believed in the long run. His record of battling special interests is simply too strong for the mud to stick, or even his occasional lapse to destroy. Nor is McCain's war record vulnerable, despite efforts to paint him as an unstable Manchurian Candidate. His refusal of early release, opting to stay with his fellow prisoners until all were released, inoculates him. He cannot be "Swift -Boated" in the same way that John Kerry unfairly was.
In other circumstances it is the piano itself that is hard to attack. This is the dilemma Hillary Clinton faces in trying to pull Barack Obama off the white piano of his soaring rhetoric and charismatic charm. Clinton has mocked the near messianic thrall into which Obama can put his audiences. Her sarcasm about Obama making the heavens open up, choirs singing and the like, only makes her seem unpleasant and desperate, as does the constant complaint that the press doesn't want to dance with her. It is pretty hard to attack hope, as Obama has successfully countered. He doesn't seem to need endless enemies the way Clinton does.
In Obama's case dancing on the white piano is him, and it's going to be pretty hard to convince people that he shouldn't be up there, no matter how much the Clintons and McCain want to paint him as a superficial song and dance man. Clinton may have more success in trying to portray him as foreign, even Muslim. The photograph, which Matt Drudge says came from the Clinton campaign, of Obama in traditional Kenyan attire is typical. When Obama objected, Clinton's campaign manager, Maggie Williams, said: "If Barack Obama's campaign wants to suggest that a photo of him wearing traditional Somali clothing is divisive, they should be ashamed."
The same tactic might have been employed after Bill Clinton tried to paint Obama as a marginal candidate in the Jesse Jackson mold - in other words, likely to appeal more to blacks than to whites. If Obama tries to say he is not a Jesse Jackson candidate, you counter by saying, as you slide the stiletto of race in between the ribs of the campaign: What's wrong with Jesse Jackson?
The other thrust of Clinton's attack is saying she is more experienced. Comparing Obama to George W. Bush, she said: "We've seen the tragic result of having a president who had neither the experience nor the wisdom to manage our foreign policy and safeguard our national security. We can't let that happen again." She took care to have a retired general next to her on the podium.
Clinton says she intends to further exploit what she calls the "experience gap" between herself and Obama. Enter the hoary old hotline- telephone-ringing-in-the-night ad. But Clinton has never really run anything, other than this campaign and a failed healthcare effort. Being married to a former president may be an experience, especially if it's Bill Clinton, and it may prepare you for certain things. But it hardly makes you ready to be commander in chief on day one.
The difficulty for Clinton is that if she touts experience in national security as the number one reason to vote for her, what happens if she beats Obama and then challenges McCain in the general election? Could she convince voters that she has more experience than he to be commander in chief, or to answer the hotline at 3 a.m.? This may be the piano on which no one will believe she can dance.
H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.
