August 14, 2007 Tuesday

For Hillary, a rare flash of unscripted ire

By Elmer Smith
Philadelphia Daily News

KIARA ASHANTI had lined Hillary Rodham Clinton up in his gun sights well before her opening remarks.

"I can't wait," he told me a day before Clinton's Q&A at the National Association of Black Journalists' annual convention in Las Vegas last week.

What he couldn't wait for was a chance to expose Clinton's liberal proposals on health reform as a step toward what he believes is an all-too-socialistic agenda. Ashanti, a financial planner and conservative blogger, wanted to raise his own visibility as much as he wanted to bring Clinton down a peg.

He did raise his visibility, but the spotlight he sought for himself showed her in a better light than it did him.

"I've never advocated socialized medicine and I hope all the journalists hear that," Clinton said in a suddenly sharpened tone.

"Do you consider Medicare socialized medicine?" she asked him pointedly.

"In a way," he answered lamely.

She finished by inviting him to speak to her aides about the substance of her health-care proposals "if you're interested in being educated, instead of being rhetorical."

For Ashanti, whom I've known since he was a high-school sophomore and who is a close friend of my daughter, the exchange may make him the darling of the Get-Hillary movement, which is working very hard to topple her even though it claims she can't win.

For Hillary, though, it was a rare moment of unvarnished reality in a carefully scripted campaign. She went for the jugular by reflex without knowing or caring whether the questioner she sparred with was a favored personality of the assembled crowd.

That one exchange could have turned a receptive audience of more than 1,000 working journalists against her, for all she knew. Indeed, several young journalists flocked to Ashanti after the meeting to get his contact information. A number of young and older journalists felt she had been arrogant.

I watched her here at a National Education Association convention last month as she did the dance that all candidates do. With a staff of researchers and committed aides to anticipate every embarrassing question and help her touch all the right rhetorical bases, she's as sharp as any campaigner I've ever seen.

That's why I applaud the Ashanti ambush. As self-serving as it was meant to be, it did what we don't do enough: prompt an unguarded response to reveal something the candidate didn't mean to say. There wasn't much substance in the question or the response, but it offered an insight into her combative side.

Later, as I and 11 other columnists met with her in a closed-door session, she proved to be as quick on her feet as she had been with Ashanti. A columnist asked her if she had pandered to a black audience by reciting the lyrics of a spiritual in what some considered an attempt to "sound black."

"Well, as you know," she responded without missing a beat, "I'm in this interracial marriage . . . "

It was a clever ice-breaker. But before this small group of columnists, which she has a less than 50-50 chance of attracting to her camp, she needed to be just as quick to come up with a real answer.

The song, "I Don't Feel Noways Tired," she pointed out, is written in a black dialect. There is no white way to say those words, she concluded.

On the genocidal warfare in the Darfur region of the Sudan, she took a surprisingly hard line. She said she favored shooting down Sudanese government airplanes "in the air and on the ground" if they continued to bomb their own people in the ongoing civil strife in that African nation.

Later that night, Kiara and I laughed about his sparring match with Hillary Clinton.

"My stepfather always tells me, 'Look what your mouth has got you into now,' " he said jokingly.

It probably gets him where he wants to be with the conservative crowd he runs with. But what his mouth got the rest of us into last week was a quick glimpse into a guarded corner of the Clinton psyche. *

Send e-mail to smithel@phillynews.com or call 215-854-2512. For recent columns: http://go.philly.com/smith