Hillary's "Don't Ask Don't Tell" and "Health Care Plan"

[Obamaman2008]

Why did Hillary fail with these?

[Maven]

1. Please tell me this is thread number 3.

[Obamaman2008]

2. Can you count?

[MADem]

3. I just saw her speaking to students in Wisconsin.

She said she would allow gays to serve openly in the military.

OOOOh, and you will LOVE this--she quoted....BARRY GOLDWATER!!!

You know, the old You don't have to be straight to shoot straight line!!

Then, she said she'd ensure health care for ALL.

Oh, the NERVE of that woman!

:rofl:

[donheld]

4. "Don't Ask Don't Tell" What other options did Bill Clinton have?

[Obamaman2008]

6. They could have intregrated the armed forces like the rest of the western civilization

[nonconformist]

10. He did that in compromise with the right wing.

You know, compromising and negotiating with the right wing? Like Obama says he's going to do? THIS is the kind of legislation that comes out of negotiating with the right wing.

[lapfog_1]

7. Off the top of my head...

1. told the military to continue witch hunts for gays (they did anyway, even with DADT). drum all of the gays out.

2. told the military that openly gay service men and women would be welcome, so long as they adhered to the code of conduct expected of all members of the military. And then accepted with sadness and regret the resignations of all those officers that wouldn't carry out the orders of the commander in chief.

[donheld]

8. This was Bill Clinton, What makes the Hillary

people that say Barack Obama will throw gays under the bus not realize that, if Hillary is given the chance, will do the same thing her husband did?

[lapfog_1]

9. I think it was the Donnie McClurkin person.

but yeah, my feeling is that both Hillary and Obama won't do that much to advance gay rights. We will be lucky if they simply hold everything at the current level of unfairness and intolerance. But then, despite having drunk all the Obama Kool Aid, I'm a cynic.

Wish I had a different feeling about it... but I don't.

[woolldog]

5. prescient

My two cents' worth--and I think it is the two cents' worth of everybody who worked for the Clinton Administration health care reform effort of 1993-1994--is that Hillary Rodham Clinton needs to be kept very far away from the White House for the rest of her life. Heading up health-care reform was the only major administrative job she has ever tried to do. And she was a complete flop at it. She had neither the grasp of policy substance, the managerial skills, nor the political smarts to do the job she was then given. And she wasn't smart enough to realize that she was in over her head and had to get out of the Health Care Czar role quickly.

So when senior members of the economic team said that key senators like Daniel Patrick Moynihan would have this-and-that objection, she told them they were disloyal. When junior members of the economic team told her that the Congressional Budget Office would say such-and-such, she told them (wrongly) that her conversations with CBO head Robert Reischauer had already fixed that. When long-time senior hill staffers told her that she was making a dreadful mistake by fighting with rather than reaching out to John Breaux and Jim Cooper, she told them that they did not understand the wave of popular political support the bill would generate. And when substantive objections were raised to the plan by analysts calculating the moral hazard and adverse selection pressures it would put on the nation's health-care system...

Hillary Rodham Clinton has already flopped as a senior administrative official in the executive branch--the equivalent of an Undersecretary. Perhaps she will make a good senator. But there is no reason to think that she would be anything but an abysmal president.

Posted by DeLong at June 7, 2003 10:15 PM

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/001600.html