Then we have a contradiction in terms. You accuse her of not being liberal enough, and then you talk of bipartisan support for non-mandated health care in the early 1990s. Mandates are an absolute must to enact government health insurance. Without them the system collapses. Bipartisan support of people funded by for-profit health companies and the pharmaceutical industry is almost worthless. What we need is a real plan that's going to work, and if it doesn't have mandates, any gov't program is going to collapse of its own weight and forever sully the name of government medicine in the United States.
The position you're taking sounds familiar, circa 2000 when people equated Gore with Bush and ended up voting for Nader.
I think the Hillary yopu speak about was long ago. I think she has been grinded up and shut off from reality by too many PR advisers. I see her as a tragic person trying to find her way, but the personal level doesn't change my negative expectations on policy and governance. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
I've been on this board for a couple years, and on dealings with Eastern Europe, I think I've always railed against Albright and Holbrooke. Would I take them over Condi/Rove/Rumsfeld, etc? Yes.
But I'm not comfortable with Obama's team either. You should read Susan Rice's papers given at her thinktank. She makes Holbrooke seem great. And though I like Samantha Power's book quite a lot, her conclusions in that same book would have led us to a wide war if she were in charge. She is an interventionist, albeit one who believes in humanitarian causes. In Bosnia, she was a vocal critic of the Vance-Owen plan because she saw it as a sop for the Serbs. OK, that's fine with me. But when James Baker scuttled the plan, the result was 100,000 murdered in the ensuing three years. The peace agreement came and Dayton looked like Vance-Owen. So, if you're going to scuttle one plan, you have a responsibility to prevent the death of 100,000. That means killing a peace plan and then intervening with hundreds of thousands of soldiers on the ground to prevent the Serbs from committing genocide. For what? When a peace agreement was in the offing already?
Her approach is maximalist. Not unlike Holbrooke and Albright's.
