You wrote that you agreed with friendly Republicans who called her a power-hungry lunatic. They hate her because she's a woman. This is pretty clear. How do I know this? Because they hated her in the 1990s before she was even a political actor. For what? For her efforts to enact gov't health care? Please.
You wrote that you agreed with friendly Republicans who called her a power-hungry lunatic. They hate her because she's a woman.
No, with all due respect, you don't know these people, so keep the accusations down. Is it always about gender in Hillaryland? Anybody who doesn't like her is automatically a sexist? It's never about the war (AUMF and Kyl-Leiberman), or the race-baiting (Shaheen, Bubba, Cuomo), or the lying (Rezko, 2001 bankruptcy bill), or the failure (health care, not reading the NIE before voting on Iraq), or her corrupt and incompetent inner circle (Penn, Wolfson, Bubba), or her time at Wal-Mart and as a corporate lawyer, or she and her husbands dealings (see Kazakhstan, Dictator of), or anything of real substance. It's always about gender, isn't it? It's always the evil men whose sole mission in life is apparently to keep women down, isn't it? That's the only logical explanation for Clinton blowing a 30-point lead, I suppose.
Wow. Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers. - George Carlin
Note redstar's points about Wellstone, et al, too. Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers. - George Carlin
The race-baiting goes both ways. In the general election, some of the cries of racism will be met with accusations of playing the race card. In general I found Bubba and Cuomo's comments to be completely non-racist, whereas I thought Shaheen's and one other (I forget now) stepped over the line. The rest of it is the same type of smears against Kerry for taking Dean down, and that ultimately cost Kerry the election. The guy was thoroughly neutered by Democrats before even beginning the general election. The same thing is happening again should Hillary win. Look at the litany you wrote above: vote on Iraq War (in line with every Democrat with aspirations of running for President including Edwards), race-baiting (a trumped up charge), lying (goes both ways since Obama's group uncovered a picture of Hillary with Rezko), failure (health care? My God, you are holding 1993 against her? Obama doesn't even have mandates), corrupt and incompetent inner circle (Bubba is listed there?), Wal-Mart lawyer (come on! please, that's as low as imagining Obama changing his policies on Big Pharma just because they are major contributors (which he did)).
It is about gender. I'm convinced. Why did your Republican friends hate her? I can't see why.
And that is quite an interesting comment on a lot of levels.
No, I don't like any of them. The US hasn't had a president I like since Roosevelt died.
But I'll take Obama because I don't know that he's a trigger-happy lunatic. Devil I don't know over the devil I do.
But I'll root for Clinton if she gets the nomination, because the thought of McCain sitting on 27 thousand megaton sends chills down my spine.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
If you are going to be an arrogant sumbitch, you'd best have some fire power backing you up, including cover (like Wellstone and Wofford were trying to provide by pushing single-payer before the Clintons forced them to pull the proposal from the table). And more important than having the firepower, you have to have the desire to use it. Fai de bčn a Bertrand, te lou rendra en cagant
Yeah, well, this arrogant sumbitch at least has logic on his side. Please use some next time.
Today she's mostly being slammed for running an incompetent campaign managed by a Republican ass, committing one PR gaffe after another, alienating her base, being financially inept, threatening to throw the entire party under a bus if she doesn't win, and not bothering to show up for important votes in the Senate.
A lot of campaign politics happens under the radar of rationality. With the flip-flopping narrative Bush was able to paint Kerry as a weak loser, even though the reality was that Bush was weak, a loser, and someone with serious mental health issues.
Because Hillary has a tin ear for narratives, she's managed to portray herself as someone who cares only about herself and will do anything - anything - to win the nod.
Obama meanwhile has run a superb campaign, based on plenty of 'we' power. The chances are good it's mostly rhetoric, but he's successfully painted himself as a winner. Leaving Hillary as the loser.
The key point that you're missing is that Obama has done nothing that Hillary couldn't have done. She started with all of the advantages, and if she'd had the people skills to build on them she'd have cruised to an easy win.
But - no evidence of people skills at all. And that's what's destroyed her campaign, more than any other factor.
What do you mean by people skills?
Are you talking about one-to-on e situations or speaking in front of an auditorium?
I simply disagree with what you're saying. But it's an attack and I can't respond to anything in specific. In point of fact, I even like her health care plan more than Obama's, so to say she only cares about herself is not quite right. Someone could easily say the same thing about Obama based on his health plan alone.
And it's only 'just an attack' if you miss the overwhelming evidence of her inability to connect with ordinary voters, to act graciously, and to create a feeling of inclusiveness - and also to pick good people to run her campaign.
These are all clear evidence that managing people - i.e. managing relationships, managing expectations, and building effective teams of supporters - is not her strong suit.
We simply disagree. If she wasn't a good "manager" she wouldn't have gotten so much done in the Senate.
The 'Republican attacks' idea is nonsense, because there really haven't been any serious attacks on her.
In fact she's attacked Obama far more aggressively than the Rs have attacked her.
She's been attacked more than any candidate in history.
This has been going on for years.
I'm really surprised you said that.
She's losing to Obama. That doesn't make her a bad manager. Under that logic, there is only one good manager every year. Last two times around, Geroge Bush was the best manager in the US.
And you really haven't addressed my criticisms, which were both logical and substantive, namely that Hillary Clinton, like her husband, is no progressive.
As for her health plan, both now and especially in 1993, quite honestly I like Richard Nixon's better. Fai de bčn a Bertrand, te lou rendra en cagant
Hillary's plan mandates that people buy insurance so that we're all in it together, it takes the load off of business which will massively increase productivity and therefore earnings by encouraging small business especially, and it provides incentive for businesses to move workers to a gov't plan, thereby making a single payer plan possible for the first time ever.
You guys crack me though. Listen to your rhetoric, it's too funny. You're talking about how your plan is good for business. Massively increase productivity. And this will somehow increase earnings.
Sorry man, but I don't drink your centrist kool-aid. First, do you have any evidence whatsoever that productivity increases translate into wage gains for most workers? Quite the contrary, they haven't. The gini coefficient has been increasing steadily in the US since the early '70's and in fact did so just as quickly under Billary's term as it has under Dumbya's term. So this is just kool-aid you are serving here.
Again, my criticism of Billary is that they are simply the moderate wing of the corporatist party in America, and you turn around and tell me how her plan is good for business. Well, thank's for proving my point.
When you have leaders, and their partisans like you, who borrow the rhetoric, framing and ideological benchmarks of the Republican party, small wonder nothing substantive has been done for workers by the "Democratic" party in over thirty years... Fai de bčn a Bertrand, te lou rendra en cagant
Obama is far to the right of Hillary on this. Without mandates, healthy people will not contribute. Look at the massive use of Medical Tax Accounts among people of means. They pay out of pocket tax-free while maintaining cheap catastrophic insurance. This would kill the government program.
You accuse me of borrowing the rhetoric of the GOP. It's funny. I think you're the one borrowing the rhetoric of the GOP. Obama's plan would be much more favored by the GOP.
Look, Paul Krugman made these same criticisms of Obama's plan. So did John Edwards. are these guys Republicans? Please. Argue the merits instead of smearing me as a Republican.
The business angle here should be obvious to you. By having a gov't program that's affordable and doesn't lard on extra fees for people with health problems, you effectively give businesses a huge reason to shuttle their workers over to the gov't pogram. Most businesses would gladly give incentives to workers (higher salaries even) to rid themselves of the health care insurance headache. Even better, their workers would get better service since so many health plans renege on covering basic services. We already ante-up our wages for health care provided by our place of employ.
On an economic front, the effect of removing the burden of providing health care on companies such as Wal-Mart would create a business boom. Toyota recently was deciding whether to open a manufacturing plant in Western NY or Southern Ontario. They went with Ontario, and their stated reasons were on health care concerns. They elected to pay much higher corporate taxes in Canada rather than deal with the health care fiasco.
This is a very leftist liberal position.
I might also add that it's very courageous as well since mandates will be a bitter pill for the electorate to swallow.
By the way, I voted for Obama a few weeks ago.
As long as that's the case, I think it's pretty clear that the BCBS, KP, GH and HPs of the world will stiff patients. Healthcare is a right, and the most efficient way to deliver it is to rationalize the administrative overhead all the while extended the mutualization pool to cover each and everyone.
Clinton's plan? Leftist it ain't. To the left of Obama's? Sure, on paper. Krugman's right about that.
But leftist would actually fund that mandate by not only rolling back the bipartisan Bush tax cuts, but re-establishing substantial tax progressivity at the personal and corporate income tax level. Government provided insurance of guaranteed equitable access to healthcare. That's more leftist. Nationalize the bloodsucking insurance companies - now you're talking.
Not directly going after the insurance companies, the tax inqeuities and healthcare access issues, essentially leaving in place the market-based for-profit medical delivery system, as Hillary (and let's be honest, Obama too) proposes? Not leftist. Not ultra-neoliberal, but not social medicine, either.
You're right - Hillary's plan would be a bitter pill to swallow. People are worried about their healthcare, losing access to it, how they can afford premiums and going bankrupt if they can't and get sick. And now Billary are saying they're going to require coverage, for people who can't even figure out how to pay the mortgage, the rent and decent food for their kids? So now they add to all the other fears the fear of the waterboarding Federal government, the one which has a knack for coming up with unfunded mandate after unfunded mandate, coming after them because they didn't buy coverage?
Damn right that's a bitter pill.
Obama at least understands this, and frames his objections to Hillary's "bitter pill" with a left frame, invoking people's fears of not being able to afford it.
Again, on paper, her's makes more economic sense, but neither one is good, and Obama wins on the framing and on not being tone-deaf to what working people fear.
Full disclosure, I didn't caucus for either of them. Fai de bčn a Bertrand, te lou rendra en cagant
With mandates, an employee would have to take any incentive from his private company to leave the company's plan and reinvest that incentive in the gov't plan. Will there be pain in the transition? I imagine so. But businesses will be putting this transition on the fast track in order to recover the unwieldy costs of having to provide health insurance for their workers. They will absolutely see the money sense of giving workers higher salaries in exchange for not having to provide them health care. If I'm paying $180 a month right now (I am) and my employer is chipping in $310 (it is) then that combined $500 a month should be enough for me to buy into the gov't plan (in fact, the gov't plan may even be less). Poor people who are squeezed? They have to be subsidized. The fact is, many of the working poor do not even have health insurance right now. This is what the health care plan is all about, providing coverage to the uninsured, because otherwise it's not going to happen. Without mandates, we're still going to have a ton of uninsured. With mandates, we will be transitioning to a single-payer system. When a huge proportion of the workforce is under a gov't plan, the transition to universal health care would be easy because the gov't could then deal directly with health care providers.
I'm at a loss to see why you're coming down harder on Clinton for health care when Obama's plan leaves a LOT more to be desired. Hillary is showing leadership on this issue. Obama isn't. I was a former Edwards' support, and if you read the Edwards diary here you'll see me say that I'd be a lot more willing to go with Obama if I could trust him on health care. He used to be excellent on it a couple years ago, but his positions have changed radically on this issue.
In any event, the devil is in the details.
You mouth platitudes about how the working poor will magically get covered with the Clinton plan. Somebody's got to show them the money though, because as you know, fucking the working poor has been a bipartisan sport since the 1970's. Fear of an unfunded mandate by the working poor is not an irrational fear,
Here are some of the other mandates the nanny-state upper-middle class and wealthy wing, the dominant wing of the Democratic party, has given them: ever more expensive child-restraint seats in cars, auto-emissions standards which make it hard for the average jalopy to get tabs/vignettes (this one hit me particularly hard when I was struggling) ever shifting burden of public school expenditures to parents via fees, kids left out of extracurriculars due to cost, et c...Think these are small beer? You try to tell that to a single mom making 20K/year with two kids and no spousal support.
Sorry, but if you have a party which hasn't put up anything on the boards for working people in decades, you'd best spell out exactly how this is going to work such that working people's discretionary incomes will not be hammered. Again, working people's fear of Democrats hitting their discretionary income is both very real and very rational.
What's really surprising to me in all of this is that there is a simple answer to all this. Take on the corporations, and fight for the wealthy to pay their fair share. Instead, we get this corporatist DLC bullshit which quite frankly is less than inspiring. Fai de bčn a Bertrand, te lou rendra en cagant
If you're holding out for a single-payer system, then good luck. And in 10 years when we don't have one we can discuss how maybe 10 years of transition from 2008 to 2018 would have been worth--if we had only pushed for mandates.
Your guy Obama is the very guy who said transitioning directly to a universal system is impossible. If you start from scratch, yes. But not in America. Those are Obama's words. I fail to see how in a thread about Obama/Clinton you are laying into Clinton for not going for universal coverage when your very own candidate scoffs completely at even the idea of universal coverage.
But at least with Billary, I know they are taking me and the left flank for idiots, and the fact they do so with a straight face makes this arrogance far too flagrant for me to even consider bothering to vote for them.
At least with Obama, there's enough ambiguity in there to suggest there might be some hope that he isn't just taking us for a ride. Fai de bčn a Bertrand, te lou rendra en cagant
On Israeli/Palestine issues and on health care issues, he is VERY far away from where he was just a year or two ago.
With Clinton, who has a longer (and quite frankly not impressive, I know she's your senator and you like her but I don't think there are more than two or three US senators today who, objectively speaking, can be characterized as "left," and Hillary ain't one of them) track record on these things, we know what's there. Nothing ambiguous about it, and it isn't attractive.
This isn't backlash, at least coming from the left. Billary lost this lefty in 1993. He was elected to put in universal healthcare and instead we got welfare "reform", NAFTA, a capital gains tax cut that G HW Bush campaigned on but was never able to get Democrats to sign (Bill succeeded where the GOP failed here, and that's not a compliment.) Telco "Reform". Et c. Bill Clinton was perhaps the best GOP President since Richard Nixon.
For better or for worse, Billary II is saddled with that legacy, especially as she surrounds herself with the same insider corporatist Dems as her husband (starting with Mark Penn). And I'll be damned if I can hold my nose for that. I didn't in '96, and I won't now either.
And let's face it, McCain doesn't make people recoil in disgust like Dubya does, so Billary will have a relatively harder time against him than Obama will. Not saying she can't win, but there is a reason why Obama does much better in general matchups than Clinton, and at least some of it is people like me saying we won't bother come November.
And yes, I understand that at some level, this isn't about me, that ultimately it only comes down to 50% of delegates plus one. But, there is are many layers of personal transaction cost to voting, absentee ballot mail in, going through the hassle of getting one in the first place, and then having to yet again vote against both one's real interests and one's conscience yet again for a moderate Republican parading as a Democrat in order to win the center. Personally, I've got better things to do. Fai de bčn a Bertrand, te lou rendra en cagant
How can anyone possibly present a point-of-view when simultaneously I have to address the fact that her 1993 proposal didn't receive bipartisan support and it wasn't a universal health coverage initiative?
I mean, which point should I address? In 1993, universal coverage would have been DOA in congress.
Also, I would note that Hillary lost you because she didn't put forward universal coverage, yet you support Obama whose health care policy is far far from universal single-payer coverage.
This doesn't make any sense at all to me.
Let's face it, Bill and Hillary Clinton badly botched something they were sent to the White House to get done. Part of it is shared with "Democratic" leaders like Daniel Patrick Moynihan. But if the Democrats had been as disciplined as the GOP is, and if the Clinton's had been competent in turning around a plan they were mandated to put in place, I have no doubt we'd have health care, equitable and for all, today.
They badly botched it, and they paid a price for that in 1994.
You all can say excuse them, and excuse the Democratic leadership at the time, saying they were too fractured, or whatever. I tend to employ occam's razon on this and say the simplest explanation is the best one: most Democratic representatives are not on our side, they are on shareholders and the corporations they own's side first and foremost. And what was true then is still true: tax cuts for the rich, Iraq, bankruptcy "reform", fisa, et c.
Until the message they come up with addresses that, Hillary ain't going anywhere for people like me. Fai de bčn a Bertrand, te lou rendra en cagant
