Last week, after Hillary said there were unanswered questions about Obama's relationship with ex-Weatherman and 1960s radical William Ayers, Obama cited her husband's grant of clemency in 2001 to Weather Underground members Susan Rosenberg and Linda Sue Evans as evidence of how selective her concerns were.
Hillary has long avoided taking a stance on those, or any of the other pardons and commutations granted by her husband, sometimes to people represented by her brothers, other times to people who were supporting her or giving money to her. In 2001, while Chuck Schumer denounced the Rosenberg commutation -- she had been linked to the 1981 Brinks robbery, in which a couple of Nyack cops (left, right) were killed -- junior senator Hillary dodged questions.
And, she's still dodging. Asked last Thursday about her opinion on Rosenberg, Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson on a conference call today offered exactly the same answer he offered seven years ago to Newsday: "She thinks that it's a pardon that was made by the president."
"That's like saying a chair is a chair," complained David Corn, the reporter who had asked the question.
Pressed, Wolfson insisted that he had never been asked about her present opinion, only her past opinion, and said: "I'm not aware that she had an opinion at the time."
That comment also has a precedent: It's the same non-answer Clinton provided when she was asked about attending a White House meeting with her husband and members of a Rockland County Hasidic community seeking clemency for some leading citizens who had been convicted of fraud after the community almost unanimously backed Hillary in the 2000 Senate race. She said she had "no opinion" on their pleas for clemency, which were granted.
For the record, our translation of all this is not "a chair is a chair." It's more like, "We're not telling because we don't think it will help us."