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Politics : The Next President 2008 -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: PROLIFE who wrote (1002)	7/5/2007 5:25:00 PM
From: Tadsamillionaire	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 3215

Hillary's early behavior as First Lady was stunningly arrogant. She disdained the press, alienated the White House staff, turned on her close friend Vince Foster (who responded by committing suicide) and appalled Al Gore by trying to claim the West Wing office suite traditionally reserved for the Vice President. She demanded a cabinet position, and when that was over-ruled, insisted on leading Clinton's efforts at health reform, despite the objections of Health and Human Services secretary Donna Shalala, who was no less a feminist than Hillary. zmag.org Hillary's attempt to create a national health insurance system--which she will have to undertake a second time as a presidential candidate--was a disaster in every way. Procedurally, she screwed up by conducting the planning under conditions of extreme secrecy, not even bothering to reach out to potentially supportive members of Congress, never mind the usual populist trimming of few televised town meetings. What Bernstein omits is her out-of-hand dismissal of the kind of single-payer system the Canadians have, which led to a tortured 1300-page piece of legislation that almost no one could comprehend. The bottom line, unnoted by Bernstein, is that, despite the right's charges of "socialized medicine," her plan would have maintained the nation's largest private insurance companies' death grip on American health care. Now it was Hillary's to be the liability, rather than the super-ego, in the Billary team. Revelations about her involvement in an obscure land deal in Arkansas suggested a conflict of interest between her prior role as both first lady of that state and an attorney at Little Rock's Rose law firm. The real scandal is that she had worked for Rose at all, which represented the notorious anti-labor firms Tyson Poultry and Wal-Mart, but Bernstein makes nothing of that. Soon Hillary, facing the possibility of a criminal indictment, was undertaking to recreate herself in a softer, cuddlier, mode. She wrote a book called It Takes a Village, on the importance of children, notable only for its sappiness and the spurious claim that her own family of origin had been idyllic. She wore pink for a defensive press conference held in the White House's Pink Library, where Bernstein politely describes her as "preternaturally calm," though the impression- with her eyelids drooping and her voice slowed, was of over-medication. Having failed with her own hard-won health portfolio, and besieged now by the press for her sleazy deals in Arkansas, Hillary began to flail--reaching out for help from New Age healer Marianne Williamson. Compared to the Bush era White House scandals, the Whitewater land deal was microscopic-- no one died or was tortured--and surely the "vast rightwing conspiracy" played a role in keeping it alive. But as Bernstein writes, what magnified it out of proportion was Hillary's own pattern of "Jesuitical lying, evasion, and ... stonewalling." She was not in the habit of being wrong--that was Bill's job--and admitting to wrong-doing was simply not in her repertoire. It took Monica Lewinsky to restore Hillary's upper hand within her marriage and, with it, her self-confidence. Apparently believing her husband's protestations of innocence, she took over the management of his defense within the White House, and, disconcertingly, started exploring the possibility of running for the senate in New York State at the very same moment the already-elected senate was voting on Bill's impeachment. But even in this time of extreme crisis--for her marriage as well as the presidency--she could not resist asserting to a family adviser that "My husband may have his faults, but he has never lied to me." Bernstein, ever the gentleman, comments only that "that statement speaks for itself."