Liar, liar?

Yesterday’s New York Times coverage of Hillary Clinton’s and Barack Obama’s joint appearance in Selma, Ala., includes a couple of snarky references suggesting that each of them lied in appealing to African-American voters. Those references are, unfortunately for the Times (and for the candidates), based on not one whiff of evidence. In fact, the evidence cuts the other way.

First Obama. Times reporters Patrick Healy and Jeff Zeleny write:

Mr. Obama relayed a story of how his Kenyan father and his Kansan mother fell in love because of the tumult of Selma, but he was born in 1961, four years before the confrontation at Selma took place. When asked later, Mr. Obama clarified himself, saying: “I meant the whole civil rights movement.”

Did Obama try to suggest that his parents met during the famed civil-rights protest in Selma? I can’t find the exact text of Obama’s speech, but Healy and Zeleny’s use of “because of” (as opposed to, for example, “at”) indicates that Obama was saying no such thing. And in the Washington Post, Anne E. Kornblut and Peter Whoriskey report Obama’s words thusly:

Referring to his heritage, Obama said that although his ancestors were not slaves, the civil rights movement inspired his African father to move from Kenya to seek an American education and eventually marry his white mother — “whose great-great-great-grandfather had owned slaves.” “But she had a different idea,” Obama said.

“Something stirred across the country because of what happened in Selma, Alabama, because some folks were willing to march across a bridge,” Obama said, explaining that, as a result, his parents “got together and Barack Obama Jr. was born.” Earlier in the day at a prayer breakfast, the Illinois Democrat said: “If it hadn’t been for Selma, I wouldn’t be here.”

That doesn’t even remotely sound as though Obama was trying to claim that his parents met in Selma. So why did the Times report that Obama “clarified himself,” as though he were backing down from an extraordinary inference? Sorry, but that kind of interpretative snark just isn’t fair.

As for Clinton, the Times’ Healy and Zeleny offer us this:

Mrs. Clinton, meanwhile, recalled going with her church youth minister as a teenager in 1963 to hear the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. speak in Chicago. Yet, in her autobiography and elsewhere, Mrs. Clinton has described growing up Republican and being a “Goldwater Girl” in 1964 — in other words, a supporter of the presidential candidacy of Senator Barry M. Goldwater, who opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Got that? The young Hillary Rodham was a Goldwater supporter. Therefore she must have opposed civil rights for African-Americans. Therefore, she must be lying when she claims that she saw King speak.

Did Clinton hear King speak in Chicago in 1963? As Bob Somerby would say (today being a day for extra-careful attribution), we have no idea. But the fact that she was a Goldwater supporter in 1964 sheds no light whatsoever on the question. And there’s circumstantial evidence to suggest that she’s telling the truth. Take, for instance, this, from an online review of Clinton’s autobiography, “Living History”:

In the interlude, she tells of hearing Martin Luther King speak in Chicago, of being in the middle (as an observer) of the Chicago riots at the Democratic Convention in 1968, and her beginnings of questioning the system of limited women’s opportunities in America. Rodham was determined to achieve, and she made her move while in high school, serving in student government and becoming a political activist.

And here’s something from a 2003 BusinessWeek review of “Living History” and Sidney Blumenthal’s “The Clinton Wars”: “Dozens of stories provide bits of insights into Hillary Clinton’s complex psyche…. You see how a lecture by the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. opened her eyes to civil rights …”

In other words, Clinton’s claim that she heard Martin Luther King speak in Chicago isn’t something she made up to feed the poor saps in Selma on Sunday — rather, it’s something she’s been saying for years. But you wouldn’t know that if you read only the Times.

Update: I was wrong about the Times and Obama. Read this.