Clinton would be getting intense crap from the RW-media noise machine and the message-board talking point regurgitators, sure - but so what? That would happen to *any *Democrat. The difference would be that she’d have enough familiarity with the public already that the noise wouldn’t be affecting anyone outside the RW bubble. I respectfully disagree that Obama’s race is behind hatred of him, since I don’t see it as any different from what Bill Clinton got.
Well, that’s one difference. Another would be that she wouldn’t have wasted as much time as Obama has trying for bipartisan compromises with a group that will never do such a thing. The stiffness of her spine has never been in doubt, but Obama has been “willing to negotiate with terrorists” in Congress.
He stated his willingness, even in the primaries, to settle for less than universal coverage, but her steadfastness only got her (and her supporters) an incredible load of crap, even from her and their fellow Democrats, who dismissed it in such terms as bitchiness, powerlust, divisiveness … well those of you know what you said, right?
If we fail once again to overcome the Moneyed Interests and get a health care program up to the standards of the civilized world, those Democrats who are susceptible to infatuation will share the blame.
Had Hillary been elected, she would still be dealing with the same loser Democratic-controlled Congress that is causing a lot of Obama’s problems. She’s a capable politician but has a habit of getting tone deaf at key moments. That was a problem with health care in the '90s and hurt her at key moments in the primaries. She does not have Bill Clinton’s skills, or Obama’s, in that regard.
Are you saying Obama would be doing better if he had trouble communicating with the public and had a tendency to come across as authoritarian? My point is she wouldn’t be doing a lot better because the economy would still be seizing up, the two wars would still be unresolved, Congress would still be more of a hindrance than a help, and a lot of Republicans would still hate her.
If Hillary had been voted in, there would have been a Republican or at least evenly mixed Legislature. Powering through a massive stimulus bill would have been impossible (which would be a good thing since all a stimulus bill does in the end is reassure the average joe that someone is doing something in which case you really only need spend as much as needed to convince the average joe of this.)
We’d have two years of very little else getting done during which Hillary would just sit back and tell the American populace that the Republican legislature was handicapping everything. So after two years in office, a Democratic majority would be voted in, Clinton would already have found her stride as the President and not be beholden to anyone, and ultimately be less of an idealist and much more of a pragmatist. She might actually have a chance at leading her party and the country. Of course, it would have taken two years to get there, but I can live with that.
There is the alternate possibility that during the two years of having everything get shot down, instead of laying blame where blame was due that she’d just start getting super shrill and throwing tantrums left and right, in which case I think that there would simply be no output from the government at all for four years and the election would have been up for open grabs from either side in 2012.
I’d lean slightly more towards option A being the more probable outcome, but either way I don’t view option B as being much different from what we have now. At least it would be D versus R instead of D (Pres) versus D (Leg) versus R
Possibly true. But evidence of Obama and Bill C. having superior communication skills that translate into superior results is not, despite your claim, present.
Huh? The GOP’s repudiation looked pretty general. And the stimulus stuff started while Bush was still in and McCain wasn’t toast yet. There is even less evidence to support your scenario than for Marley23’s.
Are you sure that’s a good thing? E.g., the present state of Western political culture being what it is, a woman in high office might be more aggressive in military/foreign-policy terms than a man in the same position, just because she thinks she’s got something to prove. Just look at Maggie Thatcher.
Would you mind explaining what you’re saying, then?
I didn’t claim superior results for them. I said that she’s got her own handicaps, same as they do, and that overall she’d have pretty much the same results.
It appears he’s saying she would have had fewer electoral coattails than Obama. Given the mood of the country in November 2008 I don’t think that makes any sense.
Sam, your effort to wrap your knee-jerk anti-Obama screeds in a historical context is considerably lacking.
First, for all the criticism Donald Rumsfeld had for the invasion of Iraq, guess what? General Tommy Franks designed and approved the plan. He thought it was a good plan. The Joint Chiefs hemmed and hawed and eventually gave a reluctant thumbs up. Shinseki essentially said he would have done it differently, but he did not oppose the plan. So what’s the lesson here? You shouldn’t venerate generals just because they have a lot of stars and ribbons. They are sometimes wrong.
What’s more, let’s look at Bush and the surge in Iraq. Now, there’ll be debate about to what extent more troops stabilized the situation vs. Iraqis taking control of their streets, but let’s assume the surge worked. Was the surge proposed by General Casey, the top commander in Iraq at the time? NO. He opposed it. It was retired General Keane who beat the drum of the surge for literally months – yes, months, not weeks, before the White House finally thought it made sense (“go all in” was the term thrown around) and found a general to execute it. Casey was essentially fired and promoted. So are you saying that Bush ought to be condemned for not taking the advice of the commander on the ground? The one who opposed the surge?
And I’m not even going to go into the historical examples of Lincoln and others who questioned whether generals were giving the right advice on strategy.
Obama has already increased forces once in Afghanistan. You imply that Gates supports McCrystal’s plan, but you conveniently ignore the fact that he’s been looking at the plan since mid-August. If Gates is entitled to look at McChrystal’s plan for several weeks before forwarding recommendations to the commander in chief, then the president – whoever he is – is entitled to examine the plan as well.
And you think it is a problem that Obama doesn’t frequently talk with McChrystal? Well, maybe, maybe not. Someone who knows a hell of a lot more about the military and history than you thinks it is a good thing.
I know this isn’t about Bush, but his mantra was “I’ll do what the generals tell me to do.” That’s a BS, cop out policy. The President is in charge of making the decisions, and he’s the one stuck with the responsibility if things go wrong. What’s more, for as many times as Bush said that, he didn’t. Especially with respect to the surge, he listened to a retired general more than anyone else, not the ground commander. For all the debates about whether Bush lied about WMD and whatnot, I don’t think he did – but when he said he’d do what the generals recommended, there, in fact, he was a liar.
about Ms. Clinton, then it will be clear to you. That “has a tendency to come across” more as opinion than fact, to be kind.
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?
She wouldn’t have been as popular as Obama, so fewer Dems would have been able to ride in with her. The populace is more liable to have seen Hillary as a loose cannon who needs to be reigned in. Neither of those, alone, would have sealed it, but together I think you’d see a different Legislature than what we have by a decent quantity.
Despite being far to the left of the Democrats throughout his life, Vidal has always supported the Dems. When he ran for the Senate in California in the early 1980s primaries (and lost) he ran as a Dem. I understand he lives in Italy and spends his time enjoying having outlived Buckley.
I would think it pretty clear that if I had thought Clinton would be doing a better job I would have voted for her, just as if you had thought she’d do a worse job, you wouldn’t have voted for her.
This meme about not listening to the military leaders is BS. The president sets the overall strategy and the military comes back with recommendations on how to get it done. Do you really think a top general is going to say “no, I think the war is un-winnable, let’s not do it”. Instead what happens is that they ask for more troops than they think they need so that they can’t be blamed when the shit storm fails. Generals and Admirals have too much at stake in their careers to buck what the president wants.
It’s the same at large corporations. They talk about open doors, and the ability to speak freely, but if you challenge the conventional wisdom you don’t get promoted and may be fired. I assure you that were lots of people at GM who knew they were driving off a cliff but didn’t want to stick their necks out. At my last job there was one multi-billion dollar project that “everyone” knew was a disaster but it continued on because the top management only wanted to hear good news.
In the military it’s worse because they are the only game in town.
All yes or no questions can be perceived as being a poll. I am so used to there being a lot of vitriol in GD threads, so I can understand someone thinking this was more of a IMHO style thread, only in GD because it’s about politics.
Tangent aside, I propose a third option–that neither of them would do better because the President doesn’t have nearly as much power as everyone thinks. I really can’t see Clinton having done anything differently that would actually have an impact. It seems to me like the Democratic congress is the one doing the most failing.
What makes you think that?!