No.
Yes.
No.
'Plant, are you saying that Whitewater, travelgate, and cattlegate didn’t happen, or that they didn’t never happen? 
They 'ardly hever 'appen.
In 'artford, 'ereford and 'ampshire . . .
Apparently not.
Certainly.
That makes you alone in all the world.
Apparently not.
[/QUOTE]
You may or may not be right. Apparently, there was not enough evidence to indict the Clintons.
Certainly.
[/QUOTE]
Probably true.
That makes you alone in all the world.
[/QUOTE]
Not a crony of personal friendship to Hillary or Bill. Starr was one small cog in a large machine of propaganda. I’m not alone. People need to be distracted from more important matters. Nothing beats a good ‘sex scandal’ to grab attention. It doesn’t bother me that the Clintons have had an open marriage since the 70s, but it annoys me that Hillary would pretend to be upset about it.
Which late 90s news headlines do more people remember… the Monica Lewinsky ‘affair’ or the Glass-Steagal Act being repealed?
Maybe you will walk into the voting booth in 2016 and think to yourself… “I want more government bureaucracy, I want more of the same DC establishment, I want to shift to a greater percentage of DC controlled command economy and have less supply+demand economy, I want 4 to 8 more years of the Clintons.” That’s fine with me. Please, by all means, be a patriotic American performing the civic duty of voting. Please, vote with your conscience. I’m just trying to make a prediction about the Dem primary and explain why I think that Hillary will lose in the primary. You and others have chosen to argue about it so I politely argue back.
Your reaction here is very revealing. Now, pretend to put yourself temporarily in the frame of mind where the Clintons want to control the primary process of the Democratic Party as much as possible…
The exclusivity clause would be a key component of that agenda, correct? Does that make sense? This is yet another scandal that will be brushed aside by the propagandists. Hillary has enough arm twisting control of the Dems to get the debates set up her way.
Or consider this…
Hillary is still mad about 2008 and feels that she is owed this favor. The Clintons’ arm-twisting behind the scenes pissed off enough DNC superdelegates to vote against her in 2008. The damage control mode took over quickly and Hillary kissed up to Obama enough to get SoS nomination. Factions of the Dem Party are still mad and want more control of the process to hurt Hillary’s chances.
I’m not sure which scenario is more likely. Hopefully, the Clintons are defeated again either way.
Now, put yourself back into your previous frame of mind, what are the other possibilities to motivate the Democratic Party (or, more broadly, the DC establishment) to have this clause? The Dems and DC establishment do not want outsider debates to overshadow theirs? Well, I suppose there’s some chance that the Clintons were not involved, but I’m not inclined to take this view.
At least I made a prediction. I looked through this thread and have not yet found a B
From 538.com (not to be confused with Fox News): Hillary Clinton Was Liberal. Hillary Clinton Is Liberal.
Senate voting record, especially during a Republican presidency, is a terrible way to assess someone’s partisan ID. You could have voted “YES” on every liberal bill and not be especially liberal. There are also lots of reasons for voting for and against bills that have nothing to do with ideological alignment.
A much more sane approach is to look at actual policy positions and compare them to, say, Bernie Sanders. I can think of at least a half-dozen major issues on which Sanders is indisputably far to the left of Clinton. Can you think of any on which Clinton is to the left of Sanders? If not, that should be a pretty clear guide that Harry Enten is talking poppycock when he says Clinton is “barely more moderate than Bernie Sanders.”
That’s true WRT individual votes, but the larger patterns that Enten’s sources looked at will still tend to capture the broader picture. (He’s not exactly going out on a limb here, and this type of analysis is widely accepted in political circles.)
(A more valid criticism would have been that Enten cited Clinton’s final senate term, when she may have been moving to the left in anticipation of the Democratic primaries.)
That’s not a more sane approach in general, in that it lends itself to subjectivity and cherry picking.
But in theory it’s possible to be correct in a given instance, in that a person can be more liberal/conservative on a lot of relatively inconsequential issues and be the other way on a few big issues which outweigh them all. I’ll grant that. I’m not willing to delve into Clinton versus Sanders at this point (if ever) so I’ll leave it at that. My post was in response to someone who asked for any reason at all to believe that HRC was any further to the left than BC, and I noted that by objective measures she is quite further to the left indeed and has always been so.
Why do the “larger patterns that Enten’s sources looked at still tend to capture the broader picture”? That seems entirely non-responsive to my criticism, which is that such analysis only looks at introduced legislation, an odd snapshot of a candidate’s overall policy positions. In the Bush Administration, no one was introducing the kind of legislation that Bernie Sanders would love but Hillary Clinton would not–like substantial changes to the minimum wage, command-and-control climate change policies, etc.
And so what if “this type of analysis is widely accepted in political circles.” I’m not sure that’s even true, but even if it is lots of stupid things are widely accepted in political circles. Is it widely accepted among political scientists?
There’s subjectivity and cherry-picking in both approaches. The approach you prefer also assigns subjective labels to legislation, and selects only that legislation for a given period.
Right, but the point is that if can only do so using a bad methodology, then it doesn’t mean much.
There’s a lot of legislation introduced on a variety of topics, and it’s reasonable to assume that overall it will capture the legislator’s leanings.
What you seem to be saying in your final sentence is that the difference between Clinton and Sanders would manifest itself in more extreme legislation of the type that was unlikely to be introduced (at least during Bush’s presidency) and thus not reflected in ratings differences. Even if this is true (and you seem to be confusing the voting analysis with the public statement analysis, which is where the comparison to Sanders was made) it’s a moot point. There’s no reason to get fixated on the specific Clinton-Sanders comparison, despite the thread subject. The point here is that Clinton was more liberal than 70% of her Democratic colleagues, and 85% of the Senate as a whole. Even if it’s true that Sanders is a lot more liberal, that’s pretty liberal in its own right, and it’s wrong to deny that or claim there’s no reason to think she’s anything left of Bill.
[I should also note that you’re focusing exclusively on the Senate voting record while ignoring the fact that this voting record also dovetailed with an analysis of her public statements, which produced essentially the same conclusion and thus both supports and validates it.]
I imagine so but can’t definitively assert this as I’ve never paid attention to the distinction between “political scientists” and political analysts.
If you want to look though some of about 27 million Google links you might get a better answer.
I disagree that the labels are necessarily subjective, and it’s incorrect that the approach only selects for legislation in a given period (though a given example might be that).
And the question is whether voting for the “D” side on legislation during a particular legislative session is a reliable or objective predictor of a presidential candidate’s ideological leanings. That’s the argument implicitly being made there, and I’m saying that I don’t see any reason to think that Senate voting record is an especially valuable tool for learning about a candidate’s ideological leanings. Hillary Clinton is more liberal on some issues than the majority of the Democratic Senators, and less liberal on others. Whether a particular sample of votes shows her to be to their left will depend entirely on that sample. You seem to assume that a legislative session or two is essentially a random sample of relevant ideological positions, and I don’t think it is.
No, there was less evidence even than that. If Starr (no Clinton crony secret or otherwise) had found anything at all, he would have published it and tried to do something with it.
Indeed he was, but it was a right-wing machine in which the Clintons were in no way involved except as targets.
Now you’re standing the Wag the Dog logic on its head. What exactly was going on at that time from which the sex scandal would have been a distraction?
To whom? She can’t just lose, you know, she has to lose to some other candidate. Who has a better shot? Sanders? O’Malley?
No one would remember anything about Glass-Steagal any better if Bill had been a faithful husband.
This half-a-dozen?
Well, you are certainly the first person I have ever heard of to float that theory. Who are the others?