Hillary Rodham Clinton had the Democratic presidential campaign trail to herself, but the camp of vacationing rival Barack Obama challenged the former first lady on her claim to have landed in Bosnia 12 years ago under sniper fire. Clinton characterized the episode as a "misstatement" and a "minor blip."
Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor said in a written statement Monday that her story "joins a growing list of instances in which Senator Clinton has exaggerated her role in foreign and domestic policy-making."
Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson countered that the Obama campaign was only raising the issue because "they have nothing positive to say about their candidate."
Presumptive Republican nominee Sen. John McCain, meanwhile, returned to the campaign after a trip to Iraq, other points in the Middle East and Europe.
Speaking to a crowd of veterans, many who served in World War II, he declared that both his Democratic rivals' calls to pull out of Iraq would produce "chaos and genocide" and require the United States to send troops back into the country America invaded five years ago.
To underscore his view of the stakes in Iraq, McCain referenced a recent audio tape from Osama bin Laden in which the al-Qaida leader urged followers to join the al-Qaida fight in Iraq and called the country "the greatest opportunity and the biggest task."
"For the first time, I have seen Osama bin Laden and General (David) Petraeus in agreement, and, that is, a central battleground in the battle against al-Qaida is in Iraq today. And that's what bin Laden was saying and that's what General Petraeus is saying and that's what I'm saying, my friends," McCain said.
"And my Democrat opponents who want to pull out of Iraq refuse to understand what's being said and what's happening _ and that is the central battleground is Iraq in this struggle against radical Islamic extremism," he added. McCain also said his Democratic rivals Obama and Clinton were naive and "dead wrong" to want to withdraw troops.
In the increasingly ugly Democratic campaign, Obama's campaign machinery refused to allow the former first lady's Bosnia story pass without getting in a dig.
During a speech about Iraq last Monday, she said of the March 1996 Bosnia trip: "I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base."
According to an AP story at the time, Clinton was placed under no extraordinary risks on that trip. One of her companions, the comedian Sinbad, told The Washington Post he had no recollection either of the threat or reality of gunfire.
The Obama campaign statement carried Internet links to a CBS news video taken from the Bosnia trip and posted on YouTube. It showed Clinton and her daughter, Chelsea, walking across the tarmac from a large cargo plane, smiling and waving, and stopping to shake hands with Bosnia's acting president and greet an 8-year-old girl.
When asked Monday about the New York senator's recounting of those events, Wolfson recalled Clinton's book, "Living History," in which she described a shortened welcoming ceremony at Tuzla Air Base, Bosnia-Herzegovina.
"Due to reports of snipers in the hills around the airstrip, we were forced to cut short an event on the tarmac with local children, though we did have time to meet them and their teachers and to learn how hard they had worked during the war to continue classes in any safe spot they could find," she wrote.
Wolfson said: "That is what she wrote in her book. That is what she has said many, many times and on one occasion she misspoke."
Asked about the issue during a meeting with the Philadelphia Daily News' editorial board on Monday, Clinton said she "misspoke."
"I went to 80 countries, you know. I gave contemporaneous accounts, I wrote about a lot of this in my book. You know, I think that, a minor blip, you know, if I said something that, you know, I say a lot of things _ millions of words a day _ so if I misspoke, that was just a misstatement," she said.
Clinton often cites the goodwill trip she took with her daughter and several celebrities as a part of her foreign policy experience, which she claims gives her an advantage over Obama.
Vietor questioned whether Clinton misspoke, saying her comments came in what appeared to be prepared remarks for the Iraq speech. His statement for the Obama campaign included a link to the speech on Clinton's campaign Web site with her account of running to the cars. Clinton's campaign said what is on the Web site is not the prepared text, but a transcript of her remarks, including comments before the speech in which she talked about the trip to Bosnia.
While Obama took time off in St. Thomas, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Clinton spoke to invited guests at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and called on the Bush administration to name an emergency working group on home mortgage foreclosures to find new ways to solve the U.S. housing crisis.
The campaign of Obama, who leads Clinton in pledged delegates, state primary contests won and popular vote, announced a six-day "Road to Change" bus tour across Pennsylvania, which holds the next presidential primary contest on April 22. The tour was to begin on Friday. Polls show Clinton with a substantial lead there.
The intense interest in the race has been reflected in a surge in Democratic Party enrollment past the 4 million mark setting a state record for either party, according to state election officials. Both the Obama and Clinton campaigns had been pushing to sign up new Democratic voters by Monday, the last day Pennsylvanians had to register to vote in the primary.
While Democratic enrollment was up by more than 4 percent, Republican enrollment declined by about 1 percent to 3.2 million statewide.
McCain's remarks to veterans in Chula Vista, California, meanwhile, marked the start of a fundraising effort on the U.S. West coast in a bid to close the huge gap between his campaign coffers and those of both Obama and Clinton.
He called the Iraq war a "a conflict that is as difficult as any we've faced in the history of our country."
He said Obama and Clinton plans for a quick withdrawal, if either is elected president, were a recipe for "chaos and genocide in the region and we will be back."
Earlier Monday, Clinton seized on voters' economic fears to push U.S. President George W. Bush to set up an emergency housing panel led by financial experts such as Robert Rubin, who was treasury secretary in her husband's administration, and former Federal Reserve chairmen Alan Greenspan and Paul Volcker.
Clinton's speech followed a weekend in which Obama's election campaign was heavily criticized for allowing a retired general to equate comments by her husband to the anti-communist witch hunts of the 1950s led by Sen. Joe McCarthy.
Clinton backer James Carville, meanwhile, stood behind his claim that New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson had acted like Jesus' betrayer Judas when he endorsed Obama.
Richardson had served in President Clinton's administration as U.N. ambassador and energy secretary.
Asked about the Judas comments on Monday, Carville, who led the former president's political rise from Arkansas' governor mansion to the White House, said his remark "had its desired intent." He said the Richardson endorsement was "an egregious act" that "deserved a response, and I'm very satisfied with the response I gave." Carville spoke on CNN.
On Sunday, Richardson said he wouldn't get into the political "gutter" to respond.
