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- Hillary Tells NRA Member She Was a Duck Hunter!
Sunday, June 2, 2002
Hillary Tells NRA Member: I Used to Be a Duck Hunter
In a surprise revelation during a Memorial Day campaign swing through upstate New York, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton announced that she used to be a duck hunter.
The bizarre claim went unreported till Sunday, when Long Island's Newsday detailed a Clinton reception in the tiny village of Fort Ann, N.Y.
Resident Holden Clous, a National Rifle Association member, asked what the paper described as "a rather hostile question" about why Mrs. Clinton favored tightening laws governing gun show sales.
"He wasn't satisfied when she said it was a logical safety measure to keep guns out of the hands of criminals, but he seemed surprised when she said she had once hunted," the paper said.
Newsday then added, "It was ducks and a long time ago, she amplified later."
Clinton apparently declined to give further details on her days as a game fowl hunter, including who she hunted with, what kind of rifle she used and how many ducks she killed.
The New York senator's long-secret hunting days conjured up memories of other unlikely assertions she's offered over the years, such as:
The claim that she once tried to enlist in the Army but was turned down because she was too old.
Her 2000 senatorial campaign metamorphosis into a Jewish New York Yankees fan.
Her 1996 announcement that at age 49, she and President Clinton were thinking of adopting another child.
The assertion that her parents named her after famed British mountain climber Sir Edmund Hilary, even though he was a complete unknown at the time who wouldn't scale Mt. Everest until five years after she was born.
During a series of small-town gatherings, Clinton told the rural crowds that she much preferred meeting with them to television appearances on shows like "Meet the Press."
"It's the nuts-and-bolts stuff of being a senator, as opposed to being on TV, talking about stuff, which I could do every night if I wanted to," the superstar senator explained.
Her newfound affinity for rural constituents stands in marked contrast to her days in Arkansas, where she used to dismiss such encounters with four-letter epithets.
The New York senator's former business partner, Susan McDougal, described one such encounter in 1996 for "Blood Sport" author James Stewart.
As McDougal looked on during a political reception, an Arkansas woman approached Mrs. Clinton with the gift of a pair of "razorback earrings" in the shape of hogs. She asked Hillary to put them on, but the then-Arkansas first lady icily demurred.
After the gift giver moved away, Clinton blurted out to McDougal, "See, this is the kind of s--t I have to put up with here."
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