# Would Hillary be doing a better job than Obama? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [October 2, 2009, 7:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-hillary-be-doing-a-better-job-than-obama/512386 "2009-10-02T19:56:23Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![gonzomax](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e8c25b/32.png) [@gonzomax](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gonzomax)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2009, 2:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-hillary-be-doing-a-better-job-than-obama/512386/41 "2009-10-05T02:44:28Z")
> [@Lakai](#): > > Vidal sounds like a bumbling old idiot: Seems very sharp and honest to me. Read some Kristol and the neocons and see if you don’t come to similar conclusions. ---
**Author:** ![YogSothoth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/8edcca/32.png) [@YogSothoth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/YogSothoth)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2009, 8:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-hillary-be-doing-a-better-job-than-obama/512386/42 "2009-10-05T20:40:50Z")
Hate for Hillary would have been magnitudes worse than hate for Obama. There would have been no honeymoon period from the public either, as a lot of them seem to hate her with little rationality too. Given that choice between worse hate and nothing done to less hate and little done, I’ll go with the latter. ---
**Author:** ![Marley23](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2009, 9:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-hillary-be-doing-a-better-job-than-obama/512386/43 "2009-10-05T21:13:07Z")
> [@ElvisL1ves](#): > > That “has a tendency to come across” more as opinion than fact, to be kind. You didn’t know it was an opinion? Get serious, **ElvisL1ves**. Of course it was my opinion. It’s an opinion based on the health care failure in 1993, when the Clinton White House is accused of screwing up by trying to bludgeon a health reform package through Congress and alienating its allies in the process, and on some of the low points of her campaign, like the “inevitability” strategy (which came across as ‘I’m the nominee and you can’t do anything about it’). > [@](#): > > Despite her having “trouble communicating with the public” and “a tendency to come across as authoritarian”? That means those things, even if they were true, wouldn’t matter, right? > > So why even say it? I said she might be doing better at the horse trading in Washington but the drawbacks, such as a less positive image with the public, would more or less cancel them out. Is this actually that complicated? ---
**Author:** ![joebuck20](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/74df32/32.png) [@joebuck20](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/joebuck20)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2009, 9:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-hillary-be-doing-a-better-job-than-obama/512386/44 "2009-10-05T21:30:36Z")
> [@YogSosoth](#): > > Hate for Hillary would have been magnitudes worse than hate for Obama. There would have been no honeymoon period from the public either, as a lot of them seem to hate her with little rationality too. > > Given that choice between worse hate and nothing done to less hate and little done, I’ll go with the latter. Agreed. The right wing has a looong history of Clinton-hating. Sure they’re saying crazy shit about Obama now, but prior to the 2008 Iowa Caucus, when it became apparent he had a serious shot at winning the White House, I doubt many conservatives really worried very much about him. With the Clintons they’ve been formulating various conspriracy theories for years, so elaborate that they’d make Obama’s alleged Kenyan birth look about as grievous as a clerical error. ---
**Author:** ![Anduril](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c0e974/32.png) [@Anduril](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Anduril)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2009, 9:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-hillary-be-doing-a-better-job-than-obama/512386/45 "2009-10-05T21:45:20Z")
> [@Napier](#): > > Look at the ways that Obama and Clinton ran their own campaign organizations. AFAIK this was the only substantial test of Clinton’s executive ability, and it was a disaster. This is just naive. Everyone knows that when you win the election, you ran the most brilliant campaign and when you lose, you made so many mistakes as to make you incompetent. The truth is, someone always loses in an election and that doesn’t make the loser incompetent. What you see as disastrous would have been seen as daring had Hillary won. What you see as military precision could be viewed as inflexible had Obama lost. ---
**Author:** ![Anduril](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c0e974/32.png) [@Anduril](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Anduril)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2009, 9:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-hillary-be-doing-a-better-job-than-obama/512386/46 "2009-10-05T21:47:43Z")
To answer the OP - Hillary would have done a much better job. Sure, there will always be Hillary-haters, but that’s old news. And anything that the GOP will throw at her will be seen as that - stale. It won’t play as much in the media. ---
**Author:** ![Dick\_Dastardly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/c4cdca/32.png) [@Dick\_Dastardly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dick_Dastardly)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2009, 10:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-hillary-be-doing-a-better-job-than-obama/512386/47 "2009-10-05T22:29:08Z")
> [@Sam\_Stone](#): > > Vidal has a point about Obama’s military knowledge and his handling of military matters. Right now, he’s got his General’s plan for Afghanistan sitting on his desk. This plan has been on his desk for weeks. The situation in Afghanistan is deteriorating. The military says it needs 35,000 soldiers desperately or the situation will still continue to deteriorate. And what is Obama’s response? He’s ‘studying it’, and says he’s going to take a few more weeks to make up his mind. This is ridiculous. > > In the meantime, Joe Biden has channeled Donald Rumsfeld and is producing a plan to win the war on the cheap, without boots on the ground, using predators and high technology. > > Does any of this sound familiar? Think Rumsfeld vs Shinsecki. Think of the drubbing Bush took on this board and elsewhere for not listening to his generals and going with his civilian SecDef’s radical ideas. > > And now we have Obama, sitting on a plan the generals have come up with and which is being urged on him so strongly that the theater commander has threatened to resign if Obama doesn’t accept it. And what’s he doing? Giving serious consideration to a plan drawn up by his idiot VP over the plan drawn up by his professional military men? It’s insane. In the meantime, his handpicked representative in Afghanistan, Richard Holbrooke, is complaining that things are adrift, no decisions are being made, hands are tied, and he can’t do his job. And Obama’s SecDef has had to come out and publicly oppose Biden’s plan. What a mess. > > The conclusion I draw from this is that Obama knows this decision is going to cost him political capital no matter which way he goes on it, and he’s delaying it until he gets health care passed. But if that’s true, it’s an awfully cynical thing to do, because soldiers are going to die in the meantime, and any ground lost to the Taliban in the interim will have to be won back at the cost of more blood. > > The more charitable, but more worrying interpretation is that Obama is overwhelmed and paralyzed by the magnitude of the decisions he’s being forced to make, and he’s simply struggling in the job. > > And you’d think that with a decision of this magnitude, Obama would be surrounded with military experts, be in numerous meetings with his generals, and in general working feverishly to figure out what to do, calling on the best help he can. But no. The accounts I’ve heard is that he’s only met with General McChrystal once, and had a 34 minute conference with him. That’s it. But by God, he can spend days trying to bring the Olympics to Chicago. How about those priorities? > > Really, his handling of Afghanistan recently is abysmal. > > Then there’s his wishy-washy UN performance, which even drew a rebuke from Sarkozy. Sarkozy [has said](http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1892375,00.html) that he’s “inexperienced, ill-prepared by advisers, and thus far not always up to standard on decision-making and efficiency.” > > In the meantime, [France is worried that Obama is too soft on Iran](http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7f6065fe-af81-11de-ba1c-00144feabdc0.html). > > When _France_ is worried that you’re too much of an appeaser, it’s time to take a big look in the mirror and think about your strategy. > > So at this point, I’d have to say that yeah, Hillary would have done a better job. The reason the plan is sitting on Obama’s desk is because six months ago they told him they needed 12 000 troops to fix the problem, now six months later they’re back for more. Obama is thinking what might happen six months or a year from now. And the military are trying to box Obama in over this. The head guy in Afghanistan said in the papers today “You can’t hope to contain the fire by letting just half the building burn.” I must have missed it when they were pointing this out from 2003-8 when we had less troops there than we do now. Afghanistan was lost before Obama took office, originally Obama wanted to tough it out until his second term when he could withdraw with no consequences but things are so bad there now he might have to do it earlier. The Biden plan is the only remotely sensible long term option too. And you can’t criticise Obama compared to Bush in terms of anything to do with wars, you really can’t. Like with the economy, the federal budget, the deficits etc., Obama is just dealing with the wreckage of the eight-year-long relentless shower of shit visited on America by the Bush administration. There are only bad and less bad ways of doing that, Obama is looking at an unfortunately endless array of turds and having to work out which ones he’d most like to step in. ---
**Author:** ![Dick\_Dastardly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/c4cdca/32.png) [@Dick\_Dastardly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dick_Dastardly)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2009, 10:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-hillary-be-doing-a-better-job-than-obama/512386/48 "2009-10-05T22:30:08Z")
> [@aldiboronti](#): > > In a recent [interview in the London Times](http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6854498.ece) Gore Vidal now says that he regrets having backed Obama in preference to Hillary Clinton. > > I have no dog in this fight as I supported neither but I can see his point. It’s certainly not difficult to imagine that Clinton would have been more forceful in her Presidency so far. But more effective? I honestly don’t know. She would have had the same obstacles to overcome as Obama. Would she have been more successful at carrying her party with her on health reform? > > Any thoughts? There would have been almost no difference at all. Same policies, same positions, same teabagging nonsense and general GOP opposition to everything. Hillary would have bent over for the financial, auto industries just as much as Obama did. Same cave-in over healthcare too but she wouldn’t even have said boo to Israel although Obama made no actual difference by saying boo. ---
**Author:** ![Grumman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/43a26b/32.png) [@Grumman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Grumman)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2009, 4:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-hillary-be-doing-a-better-job-than-obama/512386/49 "2009-10-06T04:34:48Z")
> [@Anduril](#): > > This is just naive. Everyone knows that when you win the election, you ran the most brilliant campaign and when you lose, you made so many mistakes as to make you incompetent. The truth is, someone always loses in an election and that doesn’t make the loser incompetent. No, but being incompetent tends to make people lose. Either address our reasons for feeling she was incompetent, or quit trying to misrepresent our position. ---
**Author:** ![ElvisL1ves](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/5daacb/32.png) [@ElvisL1ves](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ElvisL1ves)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2009, 2:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-hillary-be-doing-a-better-job-than-obama/512386/50 "2009-10-06T14:00:02Z")
> [@Marley23](#): > > Of course it was my opinion. It’s an opinion based on the health care failure in 1993, when the Clinton White House is accused of screwing up by trying to bludgeon a health reform package through Congress and alienating its allies in the process, and on some of the low points of her campaign, like the “inevitability” strategy (which came across as ‘I’m the nominee and you can’t do anything about it’). Fine, as long as you acknowledge that you’re essentially expressing just your own hatred, not any of those “fact” thingies. **Grumman** , if you go over the vote totals, you’ll find a very fine line between whatever your favorite laudatory words for Obama are and “incompetence”. Try another formulation: Perhaps you could explain why he had to work so hard to defeat someone with all the severe defects, including this “incompetence”, that you and **Marley23** point out? How could someone that “incompetent” have come so close? One characteristic that embracers of hate do seem to share is an inability to consider even the possibility that that’s what it is. **Dick** , you’re right to point out that he’s got enough to do just cleaning up after Bush, but at some point those problems do become his. He does have to decide what our objectives in Afghanistan ought to be (if they’re much broader than “catch Bin Laden” then there’s going to have to be some discussion). **YogSosoth** , do you think there would be, or still is, some substantial portion of the population yet to be converted to Hillary Hate? I would have thought we were all used to dismissing that noise from the long years of RW yammerers pushing it. But then, it did turn up among a surprising number of Democrats who had become infatuated with her opponent, so maybe you’re right. > [@BigT](#): > > All yes or no questions can be perceived as being a poll. But this is Great Debates. Opinions are expected to be supported, or at least explained, or they’re just a waste of server space. ---
**Author:** ![Marley23](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2009, 3:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-hillary-be-doing-a-better-job-than-obama/512386/51 "2009-10-06T15:57:30Z")
> [@ElvisL1ves](#): > > Fine, as long as you acknowledge that you’re essentially expressing just your own hatred, not any of those “fact” thingies. Since the Democratic primaries ended more than a year ago, I’d forgotten how tiresome it was to experience your railing against anybody who had the nerve to criticize anything Hillary Clinton did. I don’t hate Clinton and never did. I’ve made that clear before, and you may have read some of them, but even if you haven’t, you’re making a ridiculous mischaracterization of what I said. I was discussing a problem she has had in communicating her messages to the public, which is part of the job of being president. I cited couple of examples. There are others, but fortunately I don’t remember all the ins and outs of the interminable campaign of the last two years. ---
**Author:** ![wonky](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wonky/32/393_2.png) [@wonky](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wonky)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2009, 4:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-hillary-be-doing-a-better-job-than-obama/512386/52 "2009-10-06T16:10:23Z")
> [@Marley23](#): > > Since the Democratic primaries ended more than a year ago, I’d forgotten how tiresome it was to experience your railing against anybody who had the nerve to criticize anything Hillary Clinton did. Lucky man. ---
**Author:** ![Gyrate](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gyrate/32/3588_2.png) [@Gyrate](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gyrate)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2009, 4:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-hillary-be-doing-a-better-job-than-obama/512386/53 "2009-10-06T16:27:14Z")
Personally I think Hillary would have been a terrible president - during the primaries she struck me as someone who was going to go out of her way to prove she could be as hardnosed as the next guy (being a woman, a Democrat and a Clinton, the “soft on everything” allegations would have come thick and fast), and it would have clouded her judgment. As SoS she can put that hardnosedness [sic] to better use; if she hadn’t been in the Cabinet she would have made an excellent Senate Majority Leader. ---
**Author:** ![Marley23](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2009, 4:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-hillary-be-doing-a-better-job-than-obama/512386/54 "2009-10-06T16:53:46Z")
I’ll agree with **Anduril** and **ElvisL1ves** on this point: Clinton made mistakes in her campaign, but they’re being magnified because she lost. Many of her mistakes were survivable, they’re just being deemed fatal in retrospect because we know the outcome. She had some advantages going in, and the caucus thing was a big miscalculation, but she did come very close to winning and not everything about her campaign was as horrible as people here keep saying it was. And by the same token Obama’s campaign was very well run but wasn’t perfect. ---
**Author:** ![wonky](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wonky/32/393_2.png) [@wonky](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wonky)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2009, 5:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-hillary-be-doing-a-better-job-than-obama/512386/55 "2009-10-06T17:04:57Z")
> [@Marley23](#): > > Many of her mistakes were survivable, they’re just being deemed fatal in retrospect because we know the outcome. Isn’t that pretty much the definition of fatal mistakes, that they can only be defined that way when you know the outcome? ---
**Author:** ![Dick\_Dastardly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/c4cdca/32.png) [@Dick\_Dastardly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dick_Dastardly)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2009, 5:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-hillary-be-doing-a-better-job-than-obama/512386/56 "2009-10-06T17:05:04Z")
> [@ElvisL1ves](#): > > **Dick** , you’re right to point out that he’s got enough to do just cleaning up after Bush, but at some point those problems do become his. He does have to decide what our objectives in Afghanistan ought to be (if they’re much broader than “catch Bin Laden” then there’s going to have to be some discussion). His objective was to muddle through till after the 2012 election then pull out. Now we find out if he’s a strong leader or a weak leader when it comes to foreign policy. If he’s strong he pulls out and does the Biden plan, if he’s weak he escalates. ---
**Author:** ![ElvisL1ves](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/5daacb/32.png) [@ElvisL1ves](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ElvisL1ves)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2009, 5:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-hillary-be-doing-a-better-job-than-obama/512386/57 "2009-10-06T17:49:37Z")
> [@Marley23](#): > > Since the Democratic primaries ended more than a year ago, I’d forgotten how tiresome it was to experience your railing against anybody who had the nerve to criticize anything Hillary Clinton did. After more than a year, it’s disappointing to continue to see the same irrational hatred still being spewed. > [@](#): > > I don’t hate Clinton and never did. You’d be the last to know, wouldn’t you? ---
**Author:** ![Marley23](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2009, 6:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-hillary-be-doing-a-better-job-than-obama/512386/58 "2009-10-06T18:02:36Z")
> [@jsgoddess](#): > > Isn’t that pretty much the definition of fatal mistakes, that they can only be defined that way when you know the outcome? You can’t be positive it’s fatal, but you can get a reasonable assesment on how damaging a mistake might be. Every campaign makes mistakes, and some of the ones seized on here were not that big a deal. They also don’t prove she would have made a bad president, but we’ll never know how that would have worked out. ---
**Author:** ![gonzomax](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e8c25b/32.png) [@gonzomax](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gonzomax)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2009, 6:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-hillary-be-doing-a-better-job-than-obama/512386/59 "2009-10-06T18:20:16Z")
She would have been worse. She owes too many people and it connected to too many power brokers. She would have stayed in Afghanistan . We listen to our generals who we declare as experts with arcane knowledge we do not have. So they say "more troops’. That is their mantra. Every damn one in the service wants more wars and more troops. When they retire ,sometimes they get honest and say what a waste their warring has been. Then they talk of the miscalculations and errors. Only when they retire, unless they go to work for a military contractor and they become even more hawkish . do they tell the truth. ---
**Author:** ![Justin\_Bailey](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/justin_bailey/32/8792_2.png) [@Justin\_Bailey](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Justin_Bailey)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2009, 6:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-hillary-be-doing-a-better-job-than-obama/512386/60 "2009-10-06T18:20:24Z")
> [@Marley23](#): > > I’ll agree with **Anduril** and **ElvisL1ves** on this point: Clinton made mistakes in her campaign, but they’re being magnified because she lost. Many of her mistakes were survivable, they’re just being deemed fatal in retrospect because we know the outcome. **She had some advantages going in** , and the caucus thing was a big miscalculation, but she did come very close to winning and not everything about her campaign was as horrible as people here keep saying it was. And by the same token Obama’s campaign was very well run but wasn’t perfect. (bolding mine) But doesn’t Hillary’s perceived advantages and “inevitability” show that her mistakes were as big as people thought? Obama was almost a complete unknown in early 2008 and the Clinton machine should have rolled right over him. While Obama ran a great campaign, he needed Hillary to bungle her campaign the way she did to win. Without that, we’re talking about President Clinton today. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-hillary-be-doing-a-better-job-than-obama/512386.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-hillary-be-doing-a-better-job-than-obama/512386.md?page=4)