Hillary Clinton very politely clobbered Bill O'Reilly in a debate on FOX News’s The O’Reilly Factor broadcast on April 28, 2008. The biggest bruiser came when O’Reilly fell into a lapse of logic and came off as sympathetic to Hillary’s position on raising taxes for the wealthy, which of course O’Reilly vehemently opposes.

O’Reilly made much of the fact that he, like the Clintons, is rich and hence subject to a potential 6% tax increase if Hillary is elected and gets her way. After assuring him that tax increases would be “only for the people making over $200,000,” O’Reilly cried out: “Well, that’s me, that’s me—you’re talking to him!” When Clinton said she stood for no more “additional burdens on middle-class families,” O’Reilly exclaimed: “But I’m not a middle-class family! I’m a rich guy!”

Clinton’s "gotcha" occurred less than a minute later when O’Reilly accused her of advocating the Robin-Hood strategy of “income redistribution”—“taking from the rich, giving to the poor.” Clinton brought up their backgrounds. While O’Reilly was growing up in Long Island, she was growing up outside of Chicago. Her dad, she said, was a small business man who got up every day and went to work, paid his taxes, and didn’t feel like “the deck was stacked against him.”

O’Reilly, eager not to be painted as a kid from a privileged background, immediately countered by trying to correct her, and in the process fell into a rhetorical trap created partly by Clinton but, amazingly, mostly by himself:



This took all the steam out of O’Reilly’s argument. For a split-second he had situated himself in the position of a working or middle-class father-—that of his own father, as it turns out—-departing from his hard-held position as a taxable “rich guy.” He shot back with the argument that there were lots more rich people these days than in decades past, but it was at best a limp-wristed counter punch which failed to recover him from his rhetorical slip.

For Clinton, it was all uphill from there. When O’Reilly said, impishly, that the economy had been just as good under Bush as it had under Clinton—-exposing just how much his own wealth has cut him off from the majority of Americans he likes to think he speaks on behalf of-—Hillary came back with numbers: under Bush, typical American families saw their incomes go down by more than $1000 a year; their energy costs have gone up $2000; and their average tax cut was just $600. As O’Reilly, lacking numbers, sat smiling in what appeared to be grudging respect of the presidential candidate, Clinton concluded by stating the truth-—that average Americans were net-losers under the Bush economy—-and promising that her presidency would see a return to the fiscal policies of her husband’s administration in the 1990s when average American were net winners.

After watching the debate on YouTube, I felt much the way "bostonboater" expressed in his or her posting: “I learned more about this candidate in 8 minutes on this interview than hours of 'debates' elsewhere.”

If the many frenzied YouTube postings by Obama supporters trashing Hillary without even mentioning the debate is an indication, her appearance on The Factor must have been one of her highest moments.