I Know You Are But What Am I?

Judge not lest thee be judged: Two articles in the New Yorker and the Nation take a look at Hillary's own past and find that it is far from having been thoroughly "vetted" for attack material and how vulnerable she would be to similar attacks as she has made on Obama's association with William Ayers or Reverend Wright.

Also, below, regarding Hillary's electability: the Boston Globe criticizes the reckless, Bush like saber rattling of her "obliterate Iran" statements (let us not forget she was a HAWK on this war before she was against it), and I do an object lesson on how difficult/impossible it is for Hillary to win this race with CNN's fun little Delegate Calculator (try it!). 

Tom Hayden of the Nation:

...She was in Chicago for three nights during the 1968 street confrontations. She chaired the 1970 Yale law school meeting where students voted to join a national student strike again an "unconscionable expansion of a war that should never have been waged." She was involved in the New Haven defense of Bobby Seale during his murder trial in 1970, as the lead scheduler of student monitors. She surely agreed with Yale president Kingman Brewster that a black revolutionary couldn't get a fair trial in America. She wrote that abused children were citizens with the same rights as their parents.

Most significantly in terms of her recent attacks on Barack, after Yale law school, Hillary went to work for the left-wing Bay Area law firm of Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein, which specialized in Black Panthers and West Coast labor leaders prosecuted for being communists. Two of the firm's partners, according to Treuhaft, were communists and the two others "tolerated communists". Then she went on to Washington to help impeach Richard Nixon, whose career was built on smearing and destroying the careers of people through vague insinuations about their backgrounds and associates. (All these citations can be found in Carl Bernstein's sympathetic 2007 Clinton biography, A Woman in Charge.)

All these were honorable words and associations in my mind, but doesn't she see how the Hillary of today would accuse the Hillary of the sixties of associating with black revolutionaries who fought gun battles with police officers, and defending pro-communist lawyers who backed communists? Doesn't the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whom Hillary attacks today, represent the very essence of the black radicals Hillary was associating with in those days? And isn't the Hillary of today becoming the same kind of guilt-by-association insinuator as the Richard Nixon she worked to impeach?

It is as if Hillary Clinton is engaged in a toxic transmission onto Barack Obama of every outrageous insult and accusation ever inflicted on her by the American right over the decades. She is running against what she might have become. Too much politics dries the soul of the idealist.

From the New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg,

My point is that Hillary Clinton has not, in fact, survived the worst that the Republican attack machine (and its pilotless drones online and on talk radio) can dish out. We will learn what the worst really means if she is nominated. The Commie law firm will be only the beginning. Many tempting targets—from Bill’s little-examined fund-raising and business activities during the past seven years to the prospect of his hanging around the White House in some as yet undefined role for another four or eight years to whatever leftovers from the Clinton “scandals” of the nineteen-nineties can be retrieved from the dumpster and reheated—remain to be machine-gunned. The whole Clinton marital soap opera, obviously off limits within the Democratic fold, will offer ample material for what Obama calls “distractions.” To take the most obvious example, the former President’s social life since leaving the White House will become, if not “fair game,” big game—and some of these right-wing dirtbags are already hiring bearers and trying on pith helmets for the safari. Is this a “there” where the Democratic Party really wants to go?

MORE AFTER THE LINK!
Let alone the fact that if Clinton is the nominee the Republicans will have us going over every aspect of the Clinton presidency a la Fox News (why didnt you stop Osama Bin Laden when you could?) over and over.

In other issues regarding Hillary's electability:

The Boston Globe slams her comments about "obliterating Iran" (they dub her "Hillary Strangelove!"):

...Rambo rhetoric like Clinton's only plays into the hands of Iranian hard-liners who want to plow ahead with efforts to attain a nuclear weapons capability. They argue that Iran must have that capability in order to deter the United States from doing what Clinton threatened to do.

While Clinton has hammered Obama for supporting military strikes in Pakistan, her comments on Iran are much more far-reaching. She seems not to realize that she undermined Iranian reformists and pragmatists. The Iranian people have been more favorable to America than any other in the Gulf region or the Middle East.

A presidential candidate who lightly commits to obliterating Iran - and, presumably, all the children, parents, and grandparents in Iran - should not be answering the White House phone at any time of day or night

And finally, take a look at this. CNN has a fun little Delegate Calculator. I did an experiment allotting the final few races: I gave Hillary HUGE margins in states she's expected to win (Kentucky and West Virginia - turns out Appalachia is the most resistant to the idea of a black preisdent), I gave her a big victory in the current battleground of Indiana, I gave Obama a smaller than expected margin in North Carolina, and, split the remaining super delegates 50-50.

So even with all that: Obama hits the 2025 delegates needed (though the Clinton campaign is pushing to move that bar to 2200 by including MI and FL). Hard to see how she can win without Obama just dropping out.

In other words, possibly by early June this will all be moot.

Keep Reading (if there's more)...

For It Before She Was Against It

As the campaign has moved to blue collar Ohio Hillary has been attacking an Obama mailer that trumpets her support for NAFTA. Admittedly, the mailer's actual "quote" regarding her support appears to be a distorted mush of a Newsday article, which is disappointing for a campaign (Obama's) that at least claims to stick to a different kind of politics.

But there is no question the actual content is accurate - she supported NAFTA and has written about it as one of Bill's major achievements. Huffington Post's David Sirota summarizes some of her other statements of support. 

Keep Reading (if there's more)...

More Beef

The experience/accomplishment question has produced some very interesting and valuable information about Obama's actual Senate record -which some find to be more substantive than Hillary Clinton's - turning her experience argument on its head.

Others have been doing their own digging. In "I Refuse to Buy Into the Obama Hype (now a supporter)" a mother explains her own investigation, not trusting the Obama hype, but not in love with Hillary either:

I came away from my research really knowing a lot more about what is important to Hillary in her heart: kids and their well being. My research changed my feeling about her significantly. About 40% of her bills dealt with health care and/or kids. As a mom with small kids, I like her passion for children's issues...But most of her other bills are much smaller in scale and scope — more targeted and more careful.

She compares bills by both senators dealing with lead paint:

The difference is in the scope and the approach...Obama's bill shows how he thinks big: do everything we can to make sure that lead-painted Thomas the Tank Engine toys don't get into the hands and mouths of millions of toddlers in this country. Or Hillary: encourage people by offering tax credits to clean up lead paint in old buildings. People have been talking about lead paint in old buildings hurting kids in living in inner cities, since, well when I was a kid — for decades. If it is still a big problem, is offering tax credits for clean up, i.e. scrape down the walls and repaint, the best way to protect kids from lead? How many of you parents have lead paint problems? How many have (or had) toxic Thomas the Tank Engine Toys ...Obama's bills risk pissing off the toy industry and the Chinese. Hillary's risks nothing.

And her further research into Obama, which changed her mind:

...I was blown away as I started going through his record. I've already mentioned his bills on health care and energy. In addition he had introduced bills on Iran, voting, veterans, global warming, campaign finance and lobbyists, Blackwater, global poverty, nuclear proliferation, and education.

Another entry from another Kossack "I Found the Beef" provides these numbers about Obama's Senate record:

Senator Obama has sponsored or co-sponsored 570 bills in the 109th and 110th Congress.
Senator Obama has sponsored or co-sponsored 15 bills that have become LAW since he joined the Senate in 2005.
Senator Obama has also introduced amendments to 50 bills, of which 16 were adopted by the Senate.

Of the bills he introduced:

Most of his legislative effort has been in the area of Energy Efficiency and Climate Change (25 bills), health care (21 bills) and public health (20 bills), consumer protection/labor (14 bills), the needs of Veterans and the Armed Forces (13 bills), Congressional Ethics and Accountability (12 bills), Foreign Policy (10 bills) Voting and Elections (9 bills), Education (7 bills), Hurricane Katrina Relief (6), the Environment (5 bills), Homeland Security (4 bills), and discrimination (4 bills).

As this poster writes "Next time someone asks you "where's the beef" in Senator Obama's Senate record, please feel free to send the link to this diary."

Keep Reading (if there's more)...

Fun with Legislation!

Blog Obsidian Wings has done everyone a great service: they've actually gone through and catalogued legislation and amendments that both Obama and Clinton have been responsible for in their years in the US Senate. Its a useful reference.

But beyond that, the blog also contains some analysis about Obama's record. Here's some excerpts:

...I follow some issues pretty closely, and over and over again, Barack Obama kept popping up, doing really good substantive things. There he was, working for nuclear non-proliferation and securing loose stockpiles of conventional weapons, like shoulder-fired missiles. There he was again, passing what the Washington Post called "the strongest ethics legislation to emerge from Congress yet" -- though not as strong as Obama would have liked. Look -- he's over there, passing a bill that created a searchable database of recipients of federal contracts and grants, proposing legislation on avian flu back when most people hadn't even heard of it, working to make sure that soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan were screened for traumatic brain injury and to prevent homelessness among veterans, successfully fighting a proposal by the VA to reexamine all PTSD cases in which full benefits had been awarded, working to ban no-bid contracts in Katrina reconstruction, and introducing legislation to criminalize deceptive political tactics and voter intimidation.

On his bipartisanship:

...all this bipartisanship stuff sounds very nice, but how do we know it actually works? Isn't this just happy talk that will evaporate in the face of reality? Or, alternately: doesn't this sort of thing involve selling our souls to our supposed partners in compromise? Curiously, Obama has an actual legislative record, and so it is possible for us to see both how he approaches bipartisan cooperation and what results it yields. And it turns out that Obama does achieve results by working with Republicans, and doesn't tend to compromise on core principles....Obama tries to find people, both Democrats and Republicans, who actually care about a particular issue enough to try to get the policy right, and then he works with them. This does not involve compromising on principle. It does, however, involve preferring getting legislation passed to having a spectacular battle.

And also contains a great rundown of his policies pushing greater transparency and accountability in government. Check it!

ALSO: This discussion of Hillary's record of "solutions":

...I don't see any significant legislation with her name on it...I don't see any accounts describing how she worked vigorously behind the scenes to further progressive goals - particularly on national security matters...in looking at her accumulated "solutions," I'm not seeing much. And that, of course, is the larger problem. Obama and Clinton's policies are pretty much the same - and they're both smart, capable candidates. The question is which one is actually going to stick out his or her neck to fight for, as they say, solutions. To me, the best evidence of future willingness to "solve" comes from past behavior. And "fighting for solutions" is not exactly how I'd characterize her 7+ years in the Senate. "Ostentatious centrism in preparation for a general election" seems closer to the mark.

Keep Reading (if there's more)...

Master of (Hillary's) Domain

So I just read Josh Green's revealing look inside the firing of Clinton's campaign manager, and the disconcerting truth that emerges is how much Hillary values loyalty over performance, a characteristic I find disturbingly echoes our current president.

But it also led me to discover this NY Times profile, which is a key article to understand the main "strategist" who is running Hillary's campaign - Mark Penn. He's the guy out making genius comments to the press over this last week. He also is CEO of a PR firm, Burson-Marstellar, that does "perception management" - spinning positive PR for tobacco companies, Saudi Arabia after 9/11, or military contracting firm Blackwater after recent controversies. Apparently created a strategy of setting up faux grassroots organizations for corporate clients to attack environmental or consumer groups. Wonderful stuff. A Hillary loyalist, he has with her during her first Senate campaign in 2000, when this article was written (after joining the Clinton cadre during the '96 election). It is incredibly illuminating even now (especially to those who wonder what I mean when I complain everything the Clintons do is calculated and focus grouped down to the word!):

For years now, aides to the Clintons have insisted that they use polls not to decide which policies to support but to learn how to persuade others to share their positions -- not to follow, in other words, but to lead. It's not true. They use polls for both purposes, and that is why to understand the state of American politics and government you need to know about Mark Penn. For the Democrats who have used market-tested ideas and language to redefine the party, he is the man who writes the questions and interprets the answers. By adding and then dividing you, turning you into a percentage and stamping you with a label, he serves as your conduit to power. And theirs.

You should know this about Penn: For the decade before Dick Morris brought him and his partner Doug Schoen to work for the Clintons, Penn served mostly corporations like Texaco and Avis. Along with corporate marketing techniques, it was a particularly corporate view of reality that he put in the service of the Clintons. He thinks about voters not just in terms of ideology -- with the cold war over, who really has one anymore? -- but in terms of lifestyle and attitude, the sitcoms they watch and the music they listen to. He searches for the little spaces where politics and government might fit between work and trips to school and soccer games.

Keep Reading (if there's more)...

Look Ma, No Lobbyists!

Worth noting, from Bloomberg:

Democrat Hillary Clinton has raised more money from lobbyists than any other presidential candidate while Republican John McCain has more of them assisting his campaign...Clinton took in $823,087 from registered lobbyists and members of their firms in 2007 and the second-biggest recipient was McCain, who took in $416,321, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington-based group which tracks political giving. Barack Obama, Clinton's rival for the Democratic nomination, doesn't take money from registered lobbyists, although he received $86,282 from employees of firms that lobby, according to the center.

She takes more lobbyist money then any of the Republican candidates did. Doesn't sound like change to me. Keep Reading (if there's more)...

Ask Not What JFK Can Do For Obama

Frank Rich's latest at the NY Times is interesting and wide ranging as always, discussing the JFK/Obama comparisons:

Before John F. Kennedy was a president, a legend, a myth and a poltergeist stalking America’s 2008 campaign, he was an upstart contender seen as a risky bet for the Democratic nomination in 1960...“He had to touch the secret fears and ambivalent longings of the American heart, divine and speak to the desires of a swiftly changing nation — his message grounded on his own intuition of some vague and spreading desire for national renewal.”

And some interesting tidbits about Clinton I wasn't aware of:

You’d never know from Mrs. Clinton’s criticisms of subprime lenders that one of the most notorious, Countrywide, was a client as recently as October of Burson-Marsteller, the public relations giant where her chief strategist, Mark Penn, is the sitting chief executive. Other high-level operatives in her campaign belong to Dewey Square Group, an outfit that just last year provided lobbying services for Countrywide.

Plus a discussion about how Obama's policy of "transparency" is really a method to reveal and then hopefully change, the influence of special interests. Keep Reading (if there's more)...

Hillary & Wal-Mart

It's a little known fact that Hillary was on the board of Wal Mart from 1986-1992. My friend Ely pointed out this story exploring how she stood by while the company waged a major campaign against organized labor. Check out the article (with vintage video!) Keep Reading (if there's more)...

Judgment: Right from Day One

In case we forget:

Every Democrat who voted for the Iraq war has fallen back on the "was just giving Bush the option but hoped he would pursue diplomatic avenues first" defense.  But lets not let foggy memory change the fact: there was no question to anyone at the time that the vote was authorizing WAR - whether it was cast by Clinton, Kerry, Edwards (who later apologized for his vote) or anyone else. No matter what dissenting statements or qualifiers they recorded for posterity on the Senate floor, the media and the American people knew what was being voted on. Bush I's National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft was publishing Op Eds in the month before pleading "Don't Attack Saddam." Check some headlines after the resolutions passed Congress:

CNN:

 "Senate approves war resolution: Administration applauds vote"

"House gives Bush authority for War with Iraq: Bush "US must confront Iraq fully and finally"

The Washington Post:

"Congress Passes Iraq Resolution. Overwhelming Approval Gives Bush Authority to Attack Unilaterally"

The fact is, if you remember, the Bush administration pushed up the vote in order to make it an issue for the Democrats in the upcoming election season. 

Clinton was fairly new to the Senate at that point, she was not running for reelection, but she did vote for the war. Why? Did she truly believe war was necessary? Was it political pressure? Was it a symptom of a sexist society: a female Senator having to prove she was "tough"?  Yet even then she had it both ways - she recorded a statement on the Senate floor stating she was not for a pre-emptive or unilateral war, yet she still voted for one. Was she, even then, doing what she thought was necessary for the future of her political career? 

Regardless of anything, I do think if anything shows someone's judgment, it is the decision to send people to risk - and sacrifice - their lives in a war. And I do think, in that, Clinton - and Kerry, and Edwards-failed. 

Obama admittedly didn't have to make that decision- at that time he was a state senator- but here is what he said in a speech after that vote:

Now let me be clear – I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein....He’s a bad guy. The world, and the Iraqi people, would be better off without him. But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history.

I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda.

I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.

Pretty accurate - 5 years ago, before a single bomb fell. Before thousands of American lives, and the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were lost. Before billions of dollars spent, with no end or exit strategy yet in sight.
Judgment.

Keep Reading (if there's more)...