By Pamela Gentry, Senior Political Producer 

(Posted April 8, 2008) – With Sen. Barack Obama’s shadow gaining on her in Pennsylvania, Sen. Hillary Clinton has been scrambling over the past few days to fight off a barrage of bad press. At a time when she needs more than ever to connect with struggling workers, she was forced to divulge that she’s actually a multi-multi-millionaire. And to make bad matters worse, she was forced to demote her top campaign adviser for cuddling up with the Columbian government on a trade agreement that the unions say undermines American employees.

But the biggest problem for Clinton – and a brand-new poll substantiates the notion – is voter perception that she’s not always trustworthy. After two straight weeks of dodging sniper fire (from the press) regarding her Bosnia experience, she was welcoming an opportunity to change the channel away from questions about her penchant for embellishing the truth. Whether it was sleep deprivation, a mere slip of the tongue after 12 straight years of truth-telling or an outright lie, her tall tale about Bosnia was dragging the campaign down. 

But, as we learned Monday with a new embarrassing report, there will be no channel-changing this week.

Turns out that one of Clinton’s oft-repeated campaign anecdotes, a compelling, tear-jerking tale about an uninsured pregnant women who gave birth to a stillborn infant before later dying herself, wasn’t quite true.

Hospital officials got tired of all the bad publicity and asked the campaign to stop re-telling this story. Rick Castrop, chief executive officer of the O’Bleness Health System, told The New York Times, “We implore the Clinton campaign to immediately desist from repeating this story.”

The hospital acknowledged the woman, Trina Bachtel, did die at the O’Bleness Memorial Hospital in Athens, Ohio in August and that her baby was stillborn.  But that’s about all that matches Clinton’s version of the story.  According to the hospital administrators, Bachtel was under the care of an obstetrics practice affiliated with the hospital. She was not asked for $100 co-pay, as Clinton contends, and was never refused treatment. Moreover, they say, Bachtel had health insurance.

Hospital officials told the Times that the Clinton campaign never called to check the story out.  Mo Elleithee, a spokesman for the Clinton campaign, said, “In this case, we did try but were not able to fully vet it.  If the hospital claims it did not happen that way, we respect that.”

Ironically,  just last Thursday, Anne E. Komblut, of The Washington Post, penned an article about Clinton’s ability to captivate her audience with moving stories about health and other issues. Clinton has “rejected sweeping oratory in favor of a dramatic speaking style all her own,” Komblut writes.

“In hushed tones, sometimes with palpable sadness in her voice, Clinton tells dark, difficult anecdotes picked up on the campaign trail,” she continues. “They often relate to health matters, culled from her conversations with voters, and are designed to illustrate a policy point. …Presidential candidates across the decades, from Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton to George W. Bush, have honed the art of picking out stories to bolster a policy position in particularly human terms. …[T]he approach seems to bring together her best skills, especially her ability to listen to voters she meets. In speeches that sometimes wear on and sometimes derail into deadening policy, sharing bleak stories can focus the audience’s attention. It also allows Clinton, who has only recently grown more comfortable talking about herself, to show that she understands how people live and how her policies would affect them.”

As Clinton is no doubt learning, once the media learns they’ve been duped, everything gets checked twice, looked at through a microscope.

It’s that additional scrutiny that allowed ABC News to catch Clinton in yet another fib.  The network says that Clinton told a crowd during the campaign stop that when Barack Obama came to the U.S. Senate in 2005, she already had been criticizing the war in Iraq – long before he stated his opposition. 

But Jack Tapper, of ABC News, said, “Clinton’s formulation ignores the fact that Obama, then a member of the Illinois Senate, spoke out against the war from the time it started in 2003, and Clinton had voted in 2002 to give President Bush authorization to go to war. “ 

Tapper said, the fact check went on to find records showing that Obama spoke out  against the war on Jan. 18, 2005 – eight days before Clinton made comments that her campaign pointed to as evidence that she spoke out against the war first, once Obama joined the Senate.

 Besides that, Clinton, in February of that year, visited Iraq and said she opposed setting deadlines for troop withdrawals. “At the same time, Obama was speaking at a town meeting in Illinois reiterating his opposition to the war,” Tapper said.