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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: calgal who wrote (22846)	9/20/2007 1:10:54 AM
From: calgal	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 71588

Clinton Sees Lessons in Past Failure Tuesday, September 18, 2007 5:11 PM Article Font Size WASHINGTON -- Thirteen years after presiding over the biggest policy debacle of her husband's presidency, Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton said Tuesday her experience with failure makes her the one who can succeed in providing universal health coverage. "If you don't learn from your mistakes, you stop growing," Clinton said in an interview with The Associated Press, insisting that Americans should trust her leadership on health care and other issues as she seeks a return to the White House in her own right. The former first lady told the AP that her seven years in the Senate had taught her valuable lessons about the need for negotiation and compromise. "I think I know what to do and what not to do," Clinton said. Clinton touched on several issues in a 20-minute interview with the AP, but health care was the dominant topic. The New York Democrat unveiled her health care plan Monday in Iowa, promising to bring coverage to every American by building on the current employer-based system and using tax credits to make insurance more affordable. The centerpiece of her plan is a so-called "individual mandate," requiring everyone to have health insurance the way most states require drivers to purchase auto insurance. Clinton's pragmatism about negotiating on health care and other issues has drawn considerable criticism from rival Democrat John Edwards. The 2004 vice presidential nominee has tried to paint Clinton as a tool of special interests in Washington and has panned her apparent willingness to allow political adversaries to have a role in crafting the health care overhaul. Clinton rejected that criticism. "I wish it were possible just to wave a magic wand and to say from the White House, 'Here's what I want.' But that's not the way it works," she told the AP. "You either convince the opposition to be part of the solution instead of part of the problem or you defeat them in the political process. That's how it works." In the interview, Clinton also refused to criticize a newspaper ad run by the liberal group MoveOn.org referring to Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, as "Gen. Betray-Us." The ad has drawn widespread scorn from Republicans, and GOP candidate Rudy Giuliani's campaign put up a Web ad criticizing Clinton for not repudiating MoveOn. Clinton was asked why her rivals' wives had been taking shots at her when the candidates themselves seemed less comfortable doing so. "I'll leave it to the others to decide how to run their campaigns," she said, laughing. Barack Obama's wife, Michelle, recently told an interviewer she rejected the notion that "it's Hillary's turn" to be president. And Elizabeth Edwards has suggested the former first lady is too polarizing to be elected and that her husband, John Edwards, would be a more effective champion for women's issues than Clinton would be. On her health care plan, Clinton said she planned to enforce the mandate to purchase health care through tax credits and other incentives. "At this point, we don't have anything punitive that we have proposed," she said. But she said she could envision a day when "you have to show proof to your employer that you're insured as a part of the job interview _ like when your kid goes to school and has to show proof of vaccination." Such details would be worked out later through negotiations with Congress, she said. The individual mandate _ and how to enforce it _ has been a flash point in the debate over how to bring health care to all. Massachusetts enacted a universal health care law this year that included such a mandate to be enforced through fines and tax penalties. But the state has already exempted 20 percent of the population from purchasing insurance because of its cost. Clinton said she had studied the Massachusetts model but felt the federal government had tools at its disposal that states don't have to help make insurance more affordable. "We're going to have a transition period. This is not going to happen immediately and be implemented immediately," she said. Republicans have been quick to criticize Clinton's plan, including presidential contender Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor who signed the state's health care plan into law. Clinton said she looked forward to tangling with her rivals over health policy, including Republicans "who understood that we had to reform health care before they started running for president." On Tuesday, Clinton began airing a 30-second ad statewide in Iowa and New Hampshire promoting her new health care plan. The ad reminds viewers of her failed effort to pass universal health care in the early 1990s, trying to portray a thwarted enterprise as one of vision. "She changed our thinking when she introduced universal health care to America," the ad's announcer says. Though her ads are airing in major markets in both states, they are appearing with greater frequency in Iowa, where polls show her in a tight contest with Obama and Edwards Meanwhile, a new national poll indicated a majority of Democrats believe Clinton would do a better job addressing health care should she be elected president than the other major candidates. Sixty-one percent of likely Democratic primary voters said they are confident in how she would handle the issue, according to a CBS News poll. That compared to 42 percent who expressed that view of Obama and 39 percent who said so about Edwards. The poll was conducted from Sept. 14 to 16 and involved telephone interviews with 706 adults. The margin of sampling error was plus or minus four percentage points. newsmax.com