BRESLAU: What's So Funny, Hillary?

Posted Thursday, April 10, 2008 4:34 PM | Andrew Romano

By Karen Breslau

It is often a measure of Hillary Clinton's discomfort when she smiles broadly and lets loose with her deep, often-mocked belly laugh. So it was at a press conference at the Pittsburgh airport this afternoon, when a CNN producer asked Clinton whether the fact that her husband had earned $800,000 for speeches designed to boost the free trade deal with Colombia - a deal that she opposes (she even demoted her controversial chief strategist Mark Penn for advocating same) constituted a conflict of interest? After all, those earnings may have comprised a part of the $5 million Clinton loaned her campaign in February. First, Clinton giggled. Then she laughed. She waved her arms in the air. Then came an "Oh my." More laughter. A few eye rolls and head shakes. Then this: "I mean, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?"

Huh? The question, reasonable enough, was hardly a thigh-slapper. It goes to the heart of Clinton's challenge in Pennsylvania, where she will need the support of organized labor to win. Does her husband's advocacy of that deal -and the fact that her now-demoted chief strategist Mark Penn was a paid consultant to the Colombian government - affect her position? In an effort to soothe those concerns, her campaign announced today that she reeled in an Ohio superdelegate, former AFL-CIO leader Bill Burga. That's not going to get nearly as much attention as her over-the-top preamble to the real message Hillary wants Pennsylvania to hear. Once she stopped laughing, Clinton did eventually manage to answer the question, but you can bet it will never get the same coverage as her initial response, which is already destined for the YouTube Hall of Fame: "I am against the trade deal," she said. "It doesn't matter who talks to me." Noting the Colombian government's abysmal record of failing to prosecute the assassins of union organizers, she added, "I am against the targeting of labor leaders. I happen to think that unionism is a fundamental human right." She closed with another incredulous chuckle.

Clinton's response, says a spokesman, was driven in part by the fact that she has taken questions non-stop in recent days on whether she is opposed to the trade deal with Colombia, and had, only moments earlier, answered another question about whether Bill Clinton, given his support of the deal, could function --as she has promised-- as her administration's roving ambassador, (She says he still can, because he would represent her administration, not his own views.) How many times can she answer the same question?

A lot. Later, perhaps sensing the damage caused by her YouTube moment, Clinton, addressed another trade question more seriously. In her White House, she said, would "take a time out" on trade agreements. "I think we have to rethink," she said. "We have to rethink the whole approach we take to trade. This is a topic that calls for a longer conversation. I believe in trade. I'm 100 per cent in favor. But I don't' believe we have had the right approach to trade in the last half of the 20th century, that benefits our standard of living... or that uses access to our market... in a way that improves the behavior of other countries." That criticism, presumably, applies to her husband's administration as well.