The Daily Background
| Bolstering experience cred, Clinton says she “spent a lot of time” with key aide… who now backs Obama
by Arlen Parsa
Yesterday, I wrote about Hillary:
By January 3rd, the date of the Iowa caucus, Clinton will have spent about 7 years in the Senate. And during that time, Clinton hasn’t stood out at all. She never made news, she hardly gave interviews, in fact, after the first month or two, everybody pretty much ignored her. There were always voices louder than hers, people doing bigger things than she was, people getting in the news more, people more popular and people more unpopular, and people who were thought to be considering running for president because of what they had actually done on their own– not because of who they were married to, or the fact that the house they used to live in is on Pennsylvania Avenue.
Today, the NYT’s Patrick Healy reports:
But during those two terms in the White House, Clinton did not hold a security clearance. She did not attend National Security Council meetings. She was not given a copy of the president’s daily intelligence briefing. She did not assert herself on the crises in Somalia, Haiti or Rwanda. And during one of President Bill Clinton’s major tests on terrorism, whether to bomb Afghanistan and Sudan in 1998, Clinton was barely speaking to her husband, let alone advising him, as the Lewinsky scandal dragged on.
In seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, Clinton lays claim to two traits nearly every day: strength and experience. But as the junior senator from New York, she has few significant legislative accomplishments to her name. She has cast herself, instead, as a first lady like no other: a full partner to her husband in his administration, and, she says, all the stronger and more experienced for her “eight years with a front-row seat on history.”
I want to highlight something that Clinton mentioned in her interview with the Times that actually made me burst out laughing. Said Clinton, “I don’t recall attending anything formal like the National Security Council because I had direct access to all of the principals. I spent a lot of time with the national security adviser…”
Although the Times does not point this out, the National Security Adviser Clinton is almost certainly referring to is Tony Lake. Lake, who “spent a lot of time with” Hillary has now made the decision that he would rather have Obama for president than her. Oops.
In all fairness, Hillary Clinton does have a steady, years-long record of getting tough on the poor and powerless, and played a very strong role in creating and enacting welfare reform policies that transferred public dollars from aiding the poor into aiding the deserving rich. She has been a powerful symbol of the New Political Woman who is unburdened by those annoying female qualities of compassion and empathy. As such, she has had a powerful cultural impact. She has shown that she can be as militaristic as any man, and will continue to be a protective force for America’s disadvantaged CEOs, while preserving and protecting our corporate culture.
Haha, undoubtedly.
Hey, I’ve got a great idea: how about we sink the ship? I mean, gee, wouldn’t it be terrible if Hillary Clinton were president? Wouldn’t that suck even more than President of the United States Rudolph Giuliani? President of the United States Mitt Romney? So let’s keep up these character assassination sentiments that will further fracture the left and have us squabbling like 5 year-olds when the Republican machine gets its crap together, picks someone, lines up behind them, uses our own arguments against our candidates, fixes the voting in Ohio AGAIN and steamrolls us all to death.
Way to keep your eye on the ball, and the ball is obviously that we couldn’t let Hillary Clinton be president. I’m not even a Hillary person, particularly, I don’t really care who the candidate is as long as they win, but the Obama people are even more acidic and vituperative than the Edwards people and I think many of them don’t care if the whole ship sinks.
And, by the way, bringing up Obama’s former drug use was poorly handled, but relevant to the way that he is portraying himself as a superhuman being that never uses the bathroom. It’s a shame it was handled badly and plays into the race issue but it’s a campaign and don’t tell me that her camp is the only reason it’s dirty. Did you read that article about Obama playing basketball? He’ll elbow you to the ground and trash talk you. I respect that, but not the way he pretends he’s E.T. meets Gandhi, it’s fake.
I’m not a fan of Hillary’s corporate ties, but how much money did Obama get off his house from political connections? Wasn’t it $200K or something? And he’s not going to have anything to do with corporations as President, right? They’ll all just disappear. Edwards too, they’ll know better to come knocking at the White House of President John Edwards looking for their golden parachutes and no-bid contracts! Gee, it makes you wonder why Ike warned about the Military-Industrial complex and didn’t just pull the plug on that darn thing!
This thing the above commenter says, that she doesn’t have compassion or empathy, what a bunch of crap, as is the idea that she doesn’t have experience.
So hey, if she wins the primary, blow it all up for spite like the Naderites did in 2000. Because the two parties are exactly the same!!! I mean, one of those candidates started a war that will never end and tore up the constitution and the other one…won the Nobel peace prize. Exactly the same! Hey, didja know that Nader has between $100,000 and $250,000 invested in the controlling interest of Occidental Petroleum?
So you go on convincing those undecided moderates that if Hillary is elected they should vote for Mitt or Rudy because even her own side would rather lose than vote for her. While Evangelicals suck it up and vote for an adulterer or a Mormon phoney you can stand strong against voting for the lesser of two evils. The Dumpster Babies Society of America salutes you!
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