e-Paper March 5 2007, page 13

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March 4, 2007

Politics Means Sometimes Having to Say You'r Sorry

 By PATRICK HEALY

O.K., so Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton won’t accede to demands from some Democrats to apologize for her 2002 vote authorizing military action in Iraq.

But that doesn’t mean she has an allergy to apologizing.

She just does it in her own, very Hillary way, as a review of her apologies shows.

Mrs. Clinton can be rather artful, for instance, at turning around her apologies to generate sympathy for herself. During her husband’s campaign against President George H. W. Bush in 1992, amid the Gennifer Flowers fracas, Mrs. Clinton casually mentioned to a journalist rumors that Mr. Bush had engaged in extramarital “carrying on.” She soon paid penance for her gossiping this way:

“It was a mistake. People were asking me questions at the time and I responded. But nobody knows better than I the pain that can be caused by even discussing rumors in private conversation, and I did not mean to be hurtful to anyone.”

Said Mary Matalin, a Bush campaign aide at the time: “They call that an apology?”

Self-deprecation is another trademark. After a head-shaker of a line in 2004 ­ that Gandhi used to run a gas station in St. Louis ­ she poked at herself by saying: “I have admired the work and life of Mahatma Gandhi. I truly regret if a lame attempt at humor suggested otherwise.”

Like many talented politicians, on matters of state ­ such as the 1994 defeat of the health care reform effort she led ­ her admission of error can be so nuanced that listeners may wonder if an apology was really her point.

“I’m not bitter,” she said in the fall of 1994. “We made mistakes. But I actually feel good about the way we ended up. We got people talking about national health care. People say, ‘Don’t give up.’ So I won’t.”

Thus, people who say that Senator Clinton is too self-righteous to admit fault on Iraq are at least half-wrong. There are plenty of examples of her saying she was wrong. And sometimes she does it quickly, as she did in 1992 to the country singer Tammy Wynette, famous for the 1969 hit, “Stand by Your Man,” after saying that she was not “some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette.”

She can also drag her heels on admitting a mistake ­ and has regretted it. She says in her autobiography that she did not appreciate the political toll of the Whitewater scandal, and that, as a result, public relations mistakes were made. At a Whitewater news conference in 1994, she said that one of her biggest regrets was that her reluctance to provide information to the news media had fed an image that she was hiding something.

Some of her Democratic rivals are thirstily trying to make a character issue out of her refusal to apologize on Iraq. Twice in the last two weeks, former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, has said that voters want a president “to tell the truth when you believe you have made a mistake,” as he put it during a visit to New York.

But beyond the fact that Mrs. Clinton says she has nothing to apologize for, she knows, as with Whitewater, that apologizing in the midst of political warfare is risky. Indeed, she has said that she is willing to lose voters rather than make an apology she does not believe in.

“In politics, people demand an apology from an opponent in order to humiliate them,” said Deborah Tannen, a linguistics professor at Georgetown who has written on apologies.

Many Americans don’t love leaders who apologize willy-nilly. In 2004, voters chose a Republican for president who stood his ground on the war against all critics instead of a Democrat who sounded apologetic when he said that he voted for $87 billion in troop funding before he voted against it.

And President Clinton was derided in some quarters as the apologizer in chief, not just for personal foibles (see Lewinsky, Monica) but for a whole history book of national wrongs (from the slave trade to Rwanda).

Graham Dodds, a political scientist at Concordia University in Montreal, who has studied political apologies, said of Mrs. Clinton, “She comes from a household that is well versed in the art of political apology, and, I’m sure, knows the risks in coming off as overly apologetic.” .

On foreign affairs, beyond Iraq, Mrs. Clinton hasn’t been much of a target for apology-seekers. She speaks with precise care on national security matters.

In a review of her history of apologizing, only one mea culpa on the international stage stands out: That she did not immediately reject remarks by Suha Arafat, wife of the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat, at a joint event where Mrs. Arafat suggested that Israel had used poison gas to control Palestinians. Mrs. Clinton denounced the remark a day later, saying she had gotten an incomplete translation.

Conventional wisdom holds that a commander in chief cannot look weak, and a female candidate for the office faces an even stricter standard for toughness.

“We’re a very macho culture, and I think every women in public office has to find her path to negotiate that,” Ms. Tannen said. “To the extent she’s a woman and has to prove she’s tough, standing her ground is the best thing to do. And to the extent she’s a woman and people don’t tolerate toughness in women, she’s going to be faulted for that.”

Professor Tannen sees four elements to a good apology: You admit fault; you express regret; you acknowledge the damage done; and you either promise to make amends, or promise not to make the same mistake again.

On the matter of her 2002 Iraq vote, Senator Clinton has put the fault on President Bush. She has expressed regret that he used the 2002 Senate vote as a means for war, acknowledged that the war was poorly conducted, and promised that she would not vote the same way again. Not exactly a rationale for an apology.

In this regard, Professor Dodds said, she is more like President Bush than her husband.

“It’s a hallmark of Bush that he sticks to his guns no matter what,” Mr. Dodds said. “If she were to apologize now, she would open herself up to the charge of flip-flopping.”

Phony apologies, too, can easily fail the smell test. So do half-way admissions of remorse.

“The thing about an apology is that it can make powerful people look weak, such as if Hillary admitted mistakes on Iraq and Democrats didn’t accept that,” Mr. Dodds said. “An apology does not always work.”