Billary tries flip-flop, gets flipped

[Undertoad]

I thought I was okay with the notion of Hillary Clinton as President. Sure, she's relentlessly political, but that actually isn't so bad. With everything run through the polls and the halls of political power in DC, what you might get is a sort of stay-the-course approach. And a dose of feel-good, which might be nice after everyone has felt so bad. And she seemed to do a decent job as Senator, although Senator is the most completely political of all elected offices.

She's faulted that her Iraq opinion tracked public opinion; when they were for it, she was for it; when they turned against it, she turned against it.

But when you think about it, this is the opposite of the Bush approach. When the shit hit the fan, Bush could have rescued his public credentials in mid-2004 with a statement of fierce outrage, a sharing of the public anger, followed by the firing of Rummy. It might not be actual leadership; Bush may not have the sense of what is actually be needed in a Sec'y of Defense, and thus the next holder of the post might not be an improvement. And you'd be firing somebody mostly for political purposes, which is simply poor behavior. You chose that person for the job, how can you fire them for appearances when things go wrong?

Instead, Bush decided to try to control the message, which simply was not possible when, if anything, communication was their weakest link. I mean, you start with the inarticulate top man, tone deaf to the public sensibilities; a Reagan or Clinton he clearly is not, and yet he persists in trying to be Reaganesque.

You know Hillary would have fired Brownie on day 6 and installed a ex-General; that way she gets to "fail up". Even if the disaster takes exactly the same course, with pretty much the same results, people feel she has been an effective leader. Bill, the most effective politician, would even be able to painfully accept blame for the problems, knowing that this would effectively diffuse the public's anger.


Bill Clinton Says His Wife Took the Rap on Health Care

ALBIA, Iowa, Nov. 8 — Former President Bill Clinton said Thursday that he should receive more blame than his wife for the failed attempt to revamp the nation’s health care system more than a decade ago.

"You know how much she cares about this," Mr. Clinton told an audience in Glenwood, Iowa, according to an account on MSNBC. "She has taken the rap for some of the problems we had with health care the last time that were far more my fault than hers."

What a marvelous calculation they have made, and how delightfully they have played it. Hillary is tainted by her failure, having greater negatives than an other Presidential candidate; part of those negatives are people remembering how ineffective she was back then. So Bill takes the blame for it. Both of them get to "fail up", with Bill appearing gracious and charming, and Hilly appearing not to have entirely backed a fucked-up health care policy basically written by the five biggest insurance companies.

Never mind that this is a narrative that has never come out before and we're 14 years after the fact with both parties having written autobiographies.

So Obama turned this new narrative beautifully in turn, and the NYT writer neatly put the Obama spin right after the BillHilly news, to help spin the spin faster:

As he campaigned here Thursday, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois said Mrs. Clinton could not claim credit for trying to overhaul health care if she did not accept any of the blame.

"All I know is that part of the record she's running on is having worked on health care," he said, "so it's kind of hard to gauge if one of her claims is to have experience in this issue to then suggest that somehow she doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that it didn't work."

Delicious. The young upstart has serious game.

+1 Obama
-1 Hillary