Bill Clinton 'Woefully Unprepared for 21st Century Media'

If there's one thing that Sens. John McCain (R-AZ), Barack Obama (D-IL) and Hillary Clinton (D-NY) all have in common, it's that each of the presidential candidates has already endured his or her very own YouTube moment. But as NBC News political director Chuck Todd sees it, none has gotten burned by this new-media phenomenon quite like former President Bill Clinton. "It's fascinating: Nobody's been a bigger victim of the so-called YouTube moments than Bill Clinton," Todd said. "I think Bill Clinton was woefully unprepared for 21st Century media." Although Clinton caught a glimpse of the digital future when he was president and a little-known Internet gadfly named Matt Drudge broke the Monica Lewinsky story, he was never subjected to the kind of unblinking scrutiny of today's media environment. When Clinton was running for president, Todd said, he and his fellow candidates could misspeak -- and even willfully obfuscate -- with relative impunity. But in 2008, Clinton's gaffes -- calling Obama's opposition to the Iraq war a "fairy tale," inviting charges of race-baiting by comparing Obama's campaign to Jesse Jackson's, reviving his wife's Bosnia trip for another spin in the news cycle -- sparked immediate blowback that seems to have caught him by surprise.
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