Here’s why I hope Hillary Clinton isn’t the Democratic nominee for President in 2008:
Clinton’s biggest blunder, as Bernstein tells it, was to offend the very legislators whose support she needed most. At a retreat for Democratic senators in the spring of 1993, Clinton was asked whether it was realistic to pursue such an ambitious health-care program, given her husband’s many other legislative initiatives. She responded that the Administration was prepared to “demonize” those who opposed the task force’s recommendations.
“That was it for me in terms of Hillary Clinton,” Senator Bill Bradley, of New Jersey, told Bernstein. “You don’t tell members of the Senate you are going to demonize them. It was obviously so basic to who she is. The arrogance. The assumption that people with questions are enemies. The disdain. The hypocrisy.”
We’ve had six years of this kind of crap from the White House. Those paragraphs are from Elizabeth’s Kobert’s roundup of Hillary Clinton biographies in the New Yorker.
June 10, 2007 at 7:30 pm
Hadn’t Bradley just lost the democratic nod to Bill Clinton the year before, though?
That said, I respected Bradley at the time, and this quote does not surprise me at all; it fits in with my (admittedly preconceived) notions about HC.
The problem is, I have not seen much to disabuse myself of those notions.
June 13, 2007 at 2:06 pm
The other problem is that at least one of those biographies is from a very questionable source — Jeff Gerth, who helped fabricate the Whitewater scandal on the front page of the NY Times. Search for his name on dailyhowler.com, or read Fools for Scandal (Gene Lyons) or The Hunting Of The President (Joe Conason & Gene Lyons), or many, many other sources for more info.
Hillary Clinton isn’t my favorite of the current Dem nominees, but she’s still vastly better than any of the GOP candidates.
June 13, 2007 at 3:29 pm
I’d vote for her over any of the Republicans in the race, no question about it.