Clinton, Going Down Flailing

I was ready to put this post up to deliver a good elbow to Clinton's side, given some recent talk from her campaign. Then I thought I would take a look at her site to see what she had up there on this last day of the primaries. As I did, I had in mind a post I'd read earlier about how Bill Clinton may still be seeing women on the side, and so I felt bad for her. With that in mind, if she had a realistic, humble front on her website I may have skipped this post.

Alas, she did not. Rather, she appears to have decided to go down flailing. While I still feel sad about the way Bill may be treating her (though it was not clear from what I read), I am nevertheless angry about a particular aspect of her recent politicking: her claim that she has a higher popular vote count than Obama. This is abhorrent to me, given: 1) the duplicitous way she comes up with the count, and 2) the way she is touting that contrived count before Americans, directly egging on the idea that Obama has not been chosen by the people.

First, with the count, she has herself around 200,000 votes in front of Obama. To reach (and yes, she reaches) for that magic (yes, it takes a little) number, she counts Michigan. She generously grants herself 328,309 from Michigan and Obama zero--yes, zero, out of the 238,168 that voted for what appeared with the name "uncommitted" on the ballot. He took his name off the ballot, as did four to five other Democrats in respect for the party rules that Michigan violated. She said Michigan did not count. The rules committee of the Democratic party said it did not count. Read more here. So not only is she manipulating the numbers, but she's throwing it out before voters with ads such as this--aired this week--and doubletalk such as this, on her website.

I'd love if there could be some substantive show of unity from her side, allowing her past lack of integrity (such as this) to be overlooked, but her over-ambition is simply too much to allow for that. This over-ambition is one reason I wrote about not wanting her as vice president and one reason I wrote back in February about how I thought she would be a Democratic devolutionist (she may yet deliver on this if her self-absorbed antics have their way and affect the willingness of voters to support Obama--scratch that, I think she has already affected the willingness of at least some to support Obama). If ever I got into the habit of thinking someone's a-okay because they wear the right party affiliation, she and Bill have throughly cured me of that. What are your thoughts on 'ol Clinton after this mess of a primary season?

Update: Following the final primaries tonight, Hillary kept flailing in her speech, with comments such as the following, which are nothing short of counterproductive in my view: "And I am just enormously grateful, because in the millions of quiet moments, in thousands of places, you asked yourself a simple question: Who will be the strongest candidate and the strongest president? Who will be ready to take back the White House and take charge as Commander-in-Chief and lead our country to better tomorrows? People in all fifty states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the territories, all had a chance to make your voices heard and on Election Day after Election Day, you came out in record numbers to cast your ballots. Nearly eighteen million of you cast your votes for our campaign, carrying the popular vote with more votes than any primary candidate in history. Even when the pundits and the naysayers proclaimed week after week that this race was over, you kept on voting."

Hillary's Earned Opposition: "Obama is a Reaganite"

I believe the Clintons have, in many ways, been earning the negative opposition they are facing. As I noted here, this opposition, and the inseparable sentiments about her husband, are enough to bring into question: 1. her ability to win the election in Nov., if nominated over Obama; 2. her ability to build support for the Democratic party and not quickly lose the opportunity for the party to move forward a progressive agenda over some number of years; and 3. perhaps most importantly, her desirability as a President, given the nature of the negative and disingenuous statements by her and Bill of recent (and this does not even touch on the myriad incidents and sordid history of their past years).

The example I'll discuss here is again, just one of the reasons why the Clintons have earned this opposition, and centers on an attack about two weeks ago, leveled by the Clintons on Obama for his "Reagan statement." In the South Carolina debate, as well as in paid advertisements, the Clintons denigrated Obama for his comments about Ronald Reagan. The terrible irony is that Bill Clinton, as detailed in this Washington Post article, praised Reagan in numerous ways during his run for the White House in 1991-1992. He said things praising Reagan's work on the Cold War, esteeming his "rhetoric in defense of freedom," and his work in "advancing the idea that communism could be rolled back." The Post article notes that during that time, the Memphis Commercial Appeal said that Bill "set himself apart from the pack of contenders for the Democratic nomination by saying something nice about Ronald Reagan," revealing his "readiness to defy his party's prevailing Reaganphobia."

Now, turning to Obama. The part of Obama's statement in question, which can be found in video and text form here, was as follows:

"I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn’t much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people, he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing...I think it’s fair to say the Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time there over the last ten, fifteen years, in the sense that they were challenging conventional wisdom."

In response to these statements, as noted in the link from above, Hillary stated: "My leading opponent the other day said that he thought the Republicans had better ideas than Democrats the last 10 to 15 years." Her husband said, "[My wife's] principal opponent said that since 1992, the Republicans have had all the good ideas....I'm not making this up, folks." Nowhere in Obama's statement does he say the Republicans had good ideas--nowhere. Rather, he says they had ideas that mobilized people, shook things up from the regular approach to things. As it says on this Chicago Tribune blog, "When the Clintons used "better" and "good" in alluding the Obama's remarks, they weren't paraphrasing, they weren't misremembering, they weren't distorting. They were simply lying."

Hillary went on to attempt to "call Obama out" on this in the SC debate two weeks ago; her statement and his reply can be found in the video below. In it, Obama points out that he has "spent a lifetime working against [Reagan's] policies," and that nowhere in his statement does he say Reagan's ideas were good or what was needed.



Hillary also paid for advertising, such as the radio ad below, that again seeks to paint Obama as one who accepts and endorses the ideas of Reagan (the ad was soon pulled from the air by the campaign):



I will not willingly accept these thin ethics again in a President, I just can't, it's not good for anyone involved. This is one reason, among others, that Obama has my vote. As noted in the wonderful thoughts of 90-year old NPR commentator Daniel Schorr, who won three Emmys in 1972 for his coverage of the Nixon Watergate lies, lying has become a shamefully acceptable practice. That short radio piece can be found here, with another short piece on lying in government here. Answer the poll below and/or write in a comment if you have any thoughts on this.

more at twiigs.com...

Update: Frank Rich of the New York Times noted another instance of what he calls not just a lie, but a "bigoted lie" by the Clintons: "Last month a Hispanic pollster employed by the Clinton campaign pitted the two groups against each other by telling The New Yorker that Hispanic voters have 'not shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates.' Mrs. Clinton then seconded the motion by telling Tim Russert in a debate that her pollster was 'making a historical statement.'It wasn’t an accurate statement, historical or otherwise. It was a lie, and a bigoted lie at that, given that it branded Hispanics, a group as heterogeneous as any other, as monolithic racists. As the columnist Gregory Rodriguez pointed out in The Los Angeles Times, all three black members of Congress in that city won in heavily Latino districts; black mayors as various as David Dinkins in New York in the 1980s and Ron Kirk in Dallas in the 1990s received more than 70 percent of the Hispanic vote. The real point of the Clinton campaign’s decision to sow misinformation and racial division, Mr. Rodriguez concluded, was to 'undermine one of Obama’s central selling points, that he can build bridges and unite Americans of all types.' "

Update 2: Robert Reich, who I've mentioned previously was Bill Clinton's former Secretary of Labor, explains some of the unethical breeches he has noticed in the Clintons' campaign: "I write this more out of sadness than anger...While it may be that all is fair in love, war, and politics, it’s not fair – indeed, it’s demeaning – for a former President to say things that are patently untrue (such as Obama’s anti-war position is a “fairy tale”) or to insinuate that Obama is injecting race into the race when the former President is himself doing it. Meanwhile, the attack ads being run in South Carolina by the Clinton camp which quote Obama as saying Republicans had all the ideas under Reagan, is disingenuous. For years, Bill Clinton and many other leading Democrats have made precisely the same point..." Read more here...