Togetherness, Hillary Clinton, Bullcrap
Hillary thinks she’s a uniter, so much so that she’s claiming Bill was when he was President. Revisionist history just ain’t going to cut it, not when the rest of us have a memory.
The Trail by Anne Kornblut has a little item this morning on Hillary Clinton and how she thinks Bill Clinton’s Administration was about togetherness. Bullcrap. Hillary might make a fine President, but it is not true that Bill Clinton’s Presidency was about togetherness. I admire Hillary for her work on healthcare in her husband’s administration, but that’s just one node that attracted the divisiveness driven by the Republicans. That’s not necessarily her fault, but history can’t be rewritten. We had an attempt by the Republicans at an impeachment for Christ’s sake! That ain’t togetherness, not by any measure. Here’s some of Hillary’s words from the WaPo:
Clinton denied that her husband had been adding to harmful divisions within the Democratic party with recent statements about Sen. Barack Obama. In fact, Clinton said, her husband was someone who “brought our country together” when he was president. He was, she said, a president who sought to “repair the breaches and mend the divides” between blacks and whites by defending affirmative action and creating a commission on civil rights.
“I think Americans from every community know what his life’s work has been,” Clinton said in a news conference at the Peabody Hotel here.
OK, OK, Kornblut asked Hillary about the divisiveness of the Clinton Administrations of the 90’s. Obvious question, right? Hillary pretty much said it was because she and Bill tried to do the right thing. In short, they didnt have the ability to unite people:
Asked about the polarization of that time, Clinton said it was a byproduct of her husband’s effort to make improvements. “I believe that his policies have always aimed at trying to lift up people, give people a chance to fulfill their God-given potential. And people knew that, people understood it. You know, Bill and I, ever since we met in law school, have been committed to giving voice to the voiceless and empowering the dis-empowered and bringing hope to the hopeless.” She added: “We don’t just talk about it — we have done it.” And as part of that, Clinton said, she and her husband “withstood a lot of the negative response that that sometimes engendered.” And yet, she said, “I believe I stand on my own merits.”
A whole bunch of double talk there, enough to make even Mitt Romney blush.
I hardly think you can blame Hillary for the vitriol directed at her and her husband. Some people were just never going to forgive Bill Clinton for 1) being a Democrat and 2) being elected president.
As for Bill’s recent “divisive” remarks, all he did, AFAIK, was to point out that black voters have an incentive to vote for a black candidate. Of course they do. There’s nothing wrong with that, and there’s nothing wrong with pointing it out.
No. Hillry is not to blame for ther vitriol aimed at her. She is, however, responsible for recognizing that the vitriol does not equal “unity.”
Actually, it may not have been Clinton’s point, but the Clinton administration was all about riding the “unity pony”, reaching “across the aisle” and “achieving compromise” with the “other side.” Clinton achieved more of the stated GOP agenda that any Republican president had managed.
Of course, they hated him for it. He was a competent administrator who took the initiatives that they ran for office on and knecapped them one after another by actually accomplishing them - eliminating their ability to use them as a “call to arms” for their own voting base. Bill Clinton’s greatest sin to the Republican politicians was being able to be a more effective Republican than many of them were able to be. He was supposed to be an incompetent rube in the mold of Carter and instead he was a slightly left-of-center HW Bush (His biggest sin to the DC press corpse was to be a hick from Arkansas who came in and “trashed the place”. But everyone gets to have a different reason to hate him.)
This is my biggest fear for an Obama administration - that Obama actually believes his rhetoric and wants to ride that magical Unity pony the way Clinton did back in the ’90s.