If John McCain wins the White House this November, he will reflect fondly on two bloody days of battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

By the end of it, during a particularly bitter 48 hours of crossfire in their marathon struggle for the Democratic nomination, they had listed so many of each other's fibs, exaggerations and false boasts about their respective records that Republican dirt-diggers could scarcely believe their luck.

Like mortar fire exploding in the inboxes of journalists and political strategists, each campaign listed in excruciating detail the false or misleading claims the opposing candidate had made. The result has been to give Republican operatives a treasure trove of fibs and exaggerations to use against the eventual nominee, a stark reminder of the potential dangers of a protracted nomination battle.

It began on March 25, when the Obama campaign pounced on Mrs Clinton's demonstrably false claim that she ran, “head down”, from sniper fire at an airport in Bosnia during a visit as First Lady.

A race like a crackpot Dynasty

The contest between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton matches any fiction

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Footage of the event showed her strolling calmly across the tarmac next to her daughter Chelsea, greeting troops and taking time to talk to a young girl.

The Obama camp's message listed several examples of when she had told the same story - in contrast to her claim that it had been the first time in 12 years that she had got the account wrong.

Mrs Clinton's aides responded rapidly, with ten instances of Mr Obama's “exaggerations and misstatements”, including his claim that his parents fell in love because of the 1965 civil rights march in Selma, Alabama, even though he was born in 1961; and his claim that he could trace his “very existence” to the Kennedy family, which he said paid for his Kenyan father's travel to America on a scholarship. The Kennedy family actually began funding such trips a year after Mr Obama's father arrived in the US.

Mr Obama was also caught out on a campaign claim that, while in the US Senate, he passed legislation requiring prompt reporting by nuclear energy companies of even small leaks. In fact, the Bill was never passed.

Not to be outgunned the Obama campaign sent a new missive on March 26: “Unfortunately, Clinton's fantastic invention of a sniper-raked landing is only a growing list of instances in which she has exaggerated her role as First Lady.”

She was accused of grossly exaggerating her role in brokering the 1998 Good Friday agreement - she at the very least accompanied her husband on several trips to Northern Ireland - and of lying in her claim to have always been against the North American Free Trade Agreement. The agreement is opposed by many blue-collar Democrats, and there is now incontrovertible evidence that Mrs Clinton lobbied on her husband's behalf to get Nafta passed in 1993.

Candidates exaggerating their records is hardly new, but while Mr Obama and Mrs Clinton's campaigns dig feverishly to find new examples of embellishment, the history of such opposition research during a primary campaign might give them pause.

During a debate in the 1988 Democratic primary campaign, Al Gore, in an effort to puncture the tough-on-crime claims of Michael Dukakis, the Massachusetts Governor, took issue with a weekend-leave programme for criminals in Mr Dukakis's state.

When Mr Dukakis became the Democratic nominee researchers for George Bush Sr, the Republican candidate, went back over the debate, and began researching the weekend-leave programme. They alighted on the case of Willie Horton, a convicted murderer who, while on weekend leave, committed armed robbery and rape. The Bush campaign turned the Horton incident into a devastating attack advertisement.

Tad Devine, a Democratic strategist unaffiliated with either campaign, said that exposing the lies and exaggerations of an opponent during a primary campaign can pose dangers for the general election. He added that the Bosnia episode was a particularly damaging one for Mrs Clinton.

“It speaks to a bigger problem she has - the issue of credibility. Her credibility suddenly came into focus and it awakened doubts over her character which is a weakness.”

Al Gore's own exaggerations came back to haunt him. During his 1999 primary campaign, Mr Gore said: “I took the initiative in creating the internet.” There was a kernel of truth in that - he was the first US senator to recognise and promote its development. But by 2000 he was being ridiculed for claiming that he had “invented the internet”. After several more embellishments, Mr Gore was portrayed by Republicans as a political Walter Mitty.

Claiming the high ground

— In the 1840 White House campaign William Henry Harrison, drawing a contrast with his opponent, the aristocratic Martin Van Buren, portrayed himself as a frontier “Indian-fighter” born in a log cabin. This story could not have been farther from his own aristocratic Virginia upbringing

— Lyndon Johnson once proclaimed to US troops in Korea that his great-great grandfather “died at the Alamo” in the battle during the Mexican-American War. In reality Johnson had a great uncle who fought in another of the war’s battles, but wasn’t killed

— John F. Kennedy told Time magazine’s Hugh Sidey that he could read 1,200 words per minute. He later admitted privately to fabricating the number out of thin air

— Ronald Reagan once told Yitzhak Shamir, the Israeli Prime Minister, that, during his time as a soldier in the Second World War he had filmed the liberation of Nazi death camps. Reagan never served in Europe, though his position required him to handle footage shot by war correspondents

— Bill Clinton famously recalled “vivid and painful memories of black churches being burnt” in Arkansas during his childhood, though records show that no black churches were burnt in Arkansas during that time. Clinton once told a gathering of Iowans that he’d heard about the Iowa Caucuses since he was “a little boy”. The caucuses didn’t exist until 1972, when he was a student at Oxford

— President Bush told the audience at a town hall meeting that he had watched the first plane hit the World Trade Centre on television while waiting to go into a schoolroom in Florida. The school’s principal said that there was no television on in the room; and no live pictures existed of the first plane hitting the tower until much later

Source: Times archive

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