Tag: Democrats (Page 14 of 28)

Dick Morris slams Hillary’s claim that she has delivered “solutions.”

As a first lady, Hillary’s sole important legislative involvement came during the first two years of her husband’s presidency when she sought to pass her ill-conceived health care reform, an effort that failed so miserably that it cost her party control of the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years. Between 1995 to 1997, she was largely absent from the White House, traveling the world, promoting her best selling book and helping to raise funds. She never attended strategy meetings and her only intervention in the singular legislative achievements of Bill’s administration — welfare reform and the balanced budget deal — was privately to urge a veto of the former and to oppose the latter because it provided for a cut in the capital gains tax. Hillary returned to the White House in 1998 to oversee the defense to the Lewinsky scandal and the impeachment attempt, but the Clinton administration essentially folded its legislative efforts during those years and hung on for dear life. No portfolio of accomplishments there.

In the Senate, she has largely spent her time raising funds for herself and other Democrats (in hopes of attracting the votes of super delegates) and promoting her best selling memoir Living History. In part because of a lack of attention and also because of the Democrats’ minority status during much of her Senate tenure, she has passed very, very little of note.

Her legislative accomplishments in her first term in the Senate were almost entirely symbolic. She renamed a courthouse after Justice Thurgood Marshall. She passed a resolution honoring Alexander Hamilton and another celebrating the win of a Syracuse University lacrosse team. She renamed post offices, founded a national park in Puerto Rico and expressed the sense of the Senate that Harriet Tubman should have gotten a federal pension 150 years ago.

Her only actual legislation included one bill to increase nurse recruitment, another to aid respite time for Alzheimer’s care givers and another to expand veterans’ health benefits, a paltry output for six years’ service.

In her second term, she has spent full-time campaigning for president and has the worst attendance record of the three senators now still in the presidential race.

So who is she kidding? If she wants to hit Obama with a negative based on his inexperience and limited legislative record, she should go right ahead. But to pretend that she is the “solutions” and “answers” person while he gives speeches is absurd.

The press has really dropped the ball here. As Morris points out, Hillary was opposed to Welfare Reform and the Balanced Budget. Al Gore and Robert Rubin were instrumental in these achievements, but Hillary was a roadblock. Coupled with here disastrous health care plan, it’s ridiculous for her to claim her husband’s achievements as her own. In this sense she has gotten a pass from the press.

That’s the description of the Clinton campaign from a brilliant post by Josh Marshall. Josh has been nuetral in the battle between Obama and Clinton, and his opinion carries significant weight in the liberal blogoshpere.

The Clinton camp’s super delegate gambit is not only audacious. Far more than that it is simply unrealistic. The super delegates who are gettable for Clinton by loyalty, conviction or coercion are already got. And enough’s been seen of both candidates for everyone to be more than acquainted with them. The ones who remain — who make up roughly half the total — are waiting to see who the winner is.

The truth is that there are over 1000 elected delegates remaining to be won. We really don’t know what’s going to happen yet. But if the trend continues and Obama ends the primary season with a clear majority of elected delegates, the idea that those remaining super delegates will break for the candidate who won fewer delegates, raised less money and is polling worse against the Republican nominee simply makes no sense. I’m not saying that’s how it will be. But if Clinton starts winning big primaries in Ohio, Texas, Pennsylvania and other states, then the whole question is moot.

But this is like the unreality that seems more and more to suffuse the Clinton campaign. I don’t mean the candidate or her policies or the premises of her candidacy. I mean the cocoon of political ridiculousness that has increasingly permeated her campaign apparatus since early January.

You’ve seen my continuous barbs at Mark Penn, Clinton’s ‘chief strategist’. The last couple days have shown very clearly I think that Clinton could do nothing better for her campaign than to throttle this clown and let her get down to the business of making a case to voters for her candidacy. Perhaps good spin is an oxymoron, moral if not linguistic. But good spin is clever and forward-leaning pitches of actual realities, facts. The word in the sense we use it today actually came into being in the early 90s and to a great degree around the ’92 Clinton campaign, which had such mastery in its practice. But this Clinton campaign has been doing it in a weird parody mode. Not sharp ‘spins’ on favorable realities, but aggressive pitches of complete nonsense. So now you have Penn successively saying caucus wins don’t really count, small state wins don’t really count, medium state wins don’t really count, states with large African-American populations don’t really count, all building up to yesterday’s gem: “Could we possibly have a nominee who hasn’t won any of the significant states — outside of Illinois? That raises some serious questions about Sen. Obama.”

People are growing tired of the Clinton spin machine. That’s one of the reasons she is losing.

This is getting to be embarassing. I know she’s desperate, but she’s doing her best now to look desperate as well.

Here’s her latest “argument” against the Obama candidacy.

“Speeches don’t put food on the table,” Mrs. Clinton said at a General Motors plant in Warren, Ohio, on Thursday morning. “Speeches don’t fill up your tank, or fill your prescription, or do anything about that stack of bills that keeps you up at night.”

“My opponent gives speeches,” she added. “I offer solutions.”

So the implication here is that Hillary has a stellar career of getting results. The problem is that she hasn’t accomplished much. She talks about 35 years of experience, and then tries to claim credit for the acomplishments of her husband’s administration.

Clinton and her supporters claim we must scrutinize Obama’s record, but scutiny of her record leads one to question her competence.

The two most important policy challenges faced by Hillary Clinton are health care and the Iraq War. Her attempt to reform health care in the 1990’s was an unmitigated distaster, plagued by secrecy, bad policy, and an inability to negotiate a good settlement. Bob Dole tried to get a compromise together that looks very similar to the health care plan she is offering now. She rejected it. Americans got nothing.

The health care debacle let to the 1994 Republican revolution, resulting in the loss of the House and the Senate by the Democrats. Thus, she created a policy disaster and a political disaster.

Then, in the Senate, she was faced with the decision of whether to support the Iraq War. Many Democrats and some Republicans had the judgement and the courage to stand up to the Bush administration and the rush to war. Hillary Clinton did not. The result was the biggest foreign policy disaster of our lifetimes.

Now, years later, she has the nerve to claim that she didn’t believe she was authorizing war, but instead was giving Bush the tools he needed to get the inspectors back in. This is pathetic. Everyone with a brain knew that Bush was heading toward war and that this resolution gave him the authority to go to war. Now we have our army stuck in a Muslim country trying to keep peace between groups of people who despise each other for religious and ethnic reasons. Thousands of lives have been lost and hundreds of billions of dollars have been wasted.

The facts are simple. Hillary Clinton faced two huge challenges in her career, and she had two opportunities to demonstrate her judgement and competence. In both cases she failed miserably. The price paid by the country for her failures have been huge.

Obama should welcome a debate with Hillary about competence and the ability to deliver.

He wins tonight in another rout. This race could be over soon.