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Hillary Clinton Tag

Posted by William A. Jacobson on February 18, 2014 26 Comments

What's in a name?...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on February 09, 2014 18 Comments
Alana Goodman at The Washington Free Beacon has published The Hillary Papers (embed at bottom of this post). Here's Alana's summary:
The papers of Diane Blair, a political science professor Hillary Clinton described as her “closest friend” before Blair’s death in 2000, record years of candid conversations with the Clintons on issues ranging from single-payer health care to Monica Lewinsky. The archive includes correspondence, diaries, interviews, strategy memos, and contemporaneous accounts of conversations with the Clintons ranging from the mid-1970s to the turn of the millennium. Diane Blair’s husband, Jim Blair, a former chief counsel at Tyson Foods Inc. who was at the center of “Cattlegate,” a 1994 controversy involving the unusually large returns Hillary Clinton made while trading cattle futures contracts in the 1970s, donated his wife’s papers to the University of Arkansas Special Collections library in Fayetteville after her death. The full contents of the archive, which before 2010 was closed to the public, have not previously been reported on and shed new light on Clinton’s three decades in public life. The records paint a complex portrait of Hillary Clinton, revealing her to be a loyal friend, devoted mother, and a cutthroat strategist who relished revenge against her adversaries and complained in private that nobody in the White House was “tough and mean enough.”
Much of the portrayal is of the bitter, brutal, belligerent Hillary we all know. But her early support for single-payer, despite later denials, is directly relevant to the Obamacare debacle that will be an issue in the 2016 election. Again Alana summarizes:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on January 27, 2014 18 Comments
Much like insurance, Hillary Clinton isn't bought, she's sold. And it's always been a hard sale. She has name recognition, and is the default candidate for a significant percentage of the electorate, but there's always been something missing. It's why Obama could appear out of nowhere to take her down, and it's why Elizabeth Warren could do the same thing if only she would run. That's why there is the Ready for Hillary shadow campaign apparatus -- we must want Hillary. The selling of Hillary by the Ready for Hillary PAC is playing out in the earliest stages of the Iowa caucuses, as Ruby Cramer at Buzzfeed reports, Clinton Supporters Want Iowa To Want Her:
After the meetings, the exhausted team declared the day a success. Attendees had been excited; had pinned “Iowans Ready for Hillary” buttons to their lapels; had smiled wide watching video clips from Clinton speeches; had even, at one point, broke into spontaneous applause and cheering at her mention. “If we build it, she will come,” said one of the meeting’s organizers, Bonnie Campbell, a former Iowa attorney general and Clinton administration appointee.... Another frustration emerged during meetings. In spending time and resources on a candidate who isn’t even in the race yet, some said, Ready for Hillary stages a “total inversion” of the traditional primary, as state Rep. Jo Oldson put it. Iowa, Oldson said, likes its candidates to beg voters — not the other way around. “This is just a different twist on how Iowans view getting into presidential campaigns,” she said. “It’s Iowa asking her to run, rather than the candidate asking Iowa to elect her.”
All this We Want You To Want Hillary stuff could backfire, as Michael Warren at The Weekly Standard points out, Hillary Supporters in Iowa: She Can't Be Seen As 'Ordained':

Posted by William A. Jacobson on January 08, 2014 29 Comments
Expect former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to quickly be turned from hero of the Democratic Party for being a Republican willing to work for Barack Obama, into just more trailer trash because of his tell-all book about that service which reinforces an accurate meme about Hillary Clinton: She has no core, and will say anything to win. From Chris Cillizza at WaPo, How Bob Gates’s memoir could haunt Hillary in 2016:
In a new memoir of his time as secretary of defense in the Obama administration, Gates writes: “Hillary told the president that her opposition to the [2007] surge in Iraq had been political because she was facing him in the Iowa primary. . . . The president conceded vaguely that opposition to the Iraq surge had been political. To hear the two of them making these admissions, and in front of me, was as surprising as it was dismaying.” Oomph. Just to jog your memory, Clinton announced that she opposed the Iraq surge being pushed by President George W. Bush in the days leading up to the announcement of her presidential bid. She instead proposed a freeze in troop levels in the country and advocated for a troop increase in Afghanistan.... At one level, Gates's allegation is not at all surprising. Politicians factor in politics when making decisions? Gasp! .... But, remember this is Hillary Clinton we are talking about. And, the criticism that has always haunted her is that everything she does is infused with politics -- that there is no core set of beliefs within her but rather just political calculation massed upon political calculation. Remember that she began slipping in the 2008 Democratic primary when her opponents seized on an overly political answer on giving drivers' licenses to illegal immigrants during a debate in late 2007.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 29, 2013 29 Comments
The NY Times published a lengthy account of the Benghazi attack that is being hyped as exonerating the Obama administration (and of course, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton), but in fact the report does nothing of the sort. The main thrust of the spin is that it was the video after all, a claim long since abandoned by almost everyone. There never was a doubt that the video inspired a generalize hostility, but that is a far cry from saying that the actual attackers who executed by contemporaneous internal administration accounts were motivated by the video. The reporting does not support that the video was what motivated the "several dozen" armed attackers, even if it created a general atmosphere of hostility. https://twitter.com/LegInsurrection/status/417120838060490754 https://twitter.com/LegInsurrection/status/417116566065389568 The NYT also plays a linguistic slight of hand, distinguishing between international al-Qaeda (NYT says no connection) and local al-Qaeda wannabees to try to prove that this was not an "al-Qaeda" attack. But local, independently operation al-Qaeda groups have been the motus operandi for years. That there was no phone call from Pakistan to the local group in Benghazi does not mean that this was not a planned Islamic extremist attack and instead some spontaneous reaction to a video:

Posted by Laurel Conrad on November 17, 2013 14 Comments
In an ironic twist, Bill Clinton is now distancing himself from Obamacare. In an interview earlier this month, Bill Clinton told online magazine Ozy:
I personally believe, even if it takes a change to the law, the president should honor the commitment the federal government made to those people and let them keep what they got.
However, this is a far cry from Hillary Clinton's previous support of Obamacare.  As Professor Jacobson pointed out on Wednesday, Hillary was more pro-mandate than Obama. Now, likely in looking forward to the 2016 election, the Clintons have suddenly changed their tune. But with an established track record of supporting Obamacare, will Hillary be able to successfully distance herself from the policy's unpopularity? Here are just five examples of Hillary's support for the Obamacare:

1.  Hillary was "very pleased" by Supreme Court decision

Hillary Clinton's initially reacted to the Supreme Court's ruling on Obamacare by saying:
I am very pleased- that's how I hoped it would turn out. I think it's a great moment just to think about what this will mean for the millions and millions of Americans who have already benefitted from the Affordable Care Act, and so many more will continue to do so. There will be a lot of work to do to get it implemented and understand what the opinion says, but obviously I was quite pleased to hear the results.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 13, 2013 14 Comments
Hillary supporters are trying to distance her from the Obamcare debacle. Don't talk about it, she is told.  Meanwhile, Bill is stabbing Obama in the back by telling him to honor his promise to the American people that they could keep their health plan. It's all about the mandate.  Forcing people "into the system" no matter what.  Even when that means they cannot keep their health plan. Democrats who are up for reelection are running from the mandate. But remember, Hillary was more pro-mandate than Obama. Here's more:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 11, 2013 24 Comments

Time Magazine recently ran a cover with a silhouette of Chris Christie with the headline, The Elephant in the Room. It was, of course, a play on Christie's weight without coming right out and saying it. There's also an elephant in Elizabeth Warren's room, but you can't weigh...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 09, 2013 28 Comments

I have been telling you for at least a year that Elizabeth Warren will be a serious challenger to Hillary, if she wants it. You have to realize that Democrats in general, and particularly the liberal base, don't give a hoot about Warren's rip-off of Cherokee...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 27, 2013 89 Comments
Update 11-8-2013: 60 Minutes backs off Benghazi witness story. ------------------------- 60 Minutes had an absolutely devastating report on the Obama administration's failure to protect Ambassador Chris Stevens and other Americans in Benghazi. I'll post the video when available (update - available and added), but the heart of the report is that there were clear and unequivocal warnings which were ignored, and the Obama administration lied about these warnings after the attack. Hillary and Obama blamed a video and stood by the caskets perpetuating that lie. And remember how almost all of the media obsessed with Mitt Romney's statement over Benghazi, and colluded to ask Romney gotcha questions while downplaying and obfuscating what really happened. 60 Minutes said its investigation took almost a year. (Transcript here) https://twitter.com/60Minutes/status/394603707167686656 https://twitter.com/60Minutes/status/394603520760221696 https://twitter.com/60Minutes/status/394604224753184768

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 15, 2013 52 Comments

Larry Sabato came out with his rankings of presidential contenders today. I was going to write about the downgrade of Marco Rubio, but that's old news. More interesting is the rankings of Democrats. There is no "First Tier" other than Hillary. The drop from Hillary to Joe...

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