Obama '08?

COURAGE AND TOUGHNESS VS. WEAKNESS AND CAUTION

KRUGMAN THEN: Obama's Plan Passes A "Basic Test of Courage" And Gets "Points For Toughness." Paul Krugman wrote, "It also passes one basic test of courage. You can't be serious about health care without proposing an injection of federal funds to help lower-income families pay for insurance, and that means advocating some kind of tax increase. Well, Mr. Obama is now on record calling for a partial rollback of the Bush tax cuts. Also, in the Obama plan, insurance companies won't be allowed to deny people coverage or charge them higher premiums based on their medical history. Again, points for toughness. Best of all, the Obama plan contains the same feature that makes the Edwards plan superior to, say, the Schwarzenegger proposal in California: it lets people choose between private plans and buying into a Medicare-type plan offered by the government." [New York Times, 6/4/07]

KRUGMAN NOW: "Obama's Caution...Led Him To Propose A Relatively Weak, Incomplete Health Care Plan." Paul Krugman wrote, "What seems to have happened is that Mr. Obama's caution, his reluctance to stake out a clearly partisan position, led him to propose a relatively weak, incomplete health care plan." [New York Times, 11/30/07]

The Obama plan doesn't mandate insurance for adults. [..] In that regard it's actually weaker than the Schwarzenegger plan. [..] Call it the timidity of hope.

On the whole, the Obama plan is better than I feared but not as comprehensive as I would have liked. It doesn't quell my worries that Mr. Obama's dislike of "bitter and partisan" politics makes him too cautious.

Yeah. Krugman doesn't seem like the kind of enemy you'd want to make.

Geez, things are going to be all over the place on a weekly/ daily basis for the next year or so, aren't they?

Yeah. Krugman doesn't seem like the kind of enemy you'd want to make.

Now, if it is the case that joe or jpb or others gained the notion that Hillary has a "sense of entitlement" only after reading Corn...that they'd never entertained such a notion previously...then your point would have merit.

Yeah. Krugman doesn't seem like the kind of enemy you'd want to make.

Very funny thing here. Kant attack ad.
http://crookedtimber.org/2007/12/08/kant-attack-ad/

Geez, things are going to be all over the place on a weekly/ daily basis for the next year or so, aren't they?

I'm still getting used to the thought that nimh and I favor the same candidate. One of us must be making a terrible mistake.

THE 1992 CAMPAIGN: Issues: Women and Families; Legal Scholars See Distortion In Attacks on Hillary Clinton

By TAMAR LEWIN
Published: August 24, 1992
Hillary Clinton, whose aggressive campaign style and dedication to children's causes seemed a political asset for Democrats at the beginning of the campaign season, now finds herself under full-scale attack as the Republicans try to turn her into a symbol of anti-family values.

The overall strategy appears to be to paint Mrs. Clinton as a radical feminist, in contrast with her Republican counterparts: Barbara Bush, the quintessential grandmother, and Marilyn Quayle, who, like Mrs. Clinton, is a lawyer but has put aside her own career to support her husband's. And the focus of the attack is on two passages from Mrs. Clinton's legal writings, in law-review articles from the 1970's.

A typical attack came from Patrick J. Buchanan, who said in his speech to the Republican National Convention on Monday night that Mrs. Clinton believed that "12-year-olds should have a right to sue their parents," and that she had "compared marriage and the family as institutions to slavery and life on an Indian reservation."

Legal scholars familiar with Mrs. Clinton's work say the Republican critics are grossly distorting her positions. When the phrases in question are read in context, these scholars said, Mrs. Clinton's articles raise few eyebrows....

But the attention to Mrs. Clinton's articles is a striking indication of just how hot a political issue the debate over women's roles has become in this Presidential election....

Mrs. Clinton has long been identified with causes that conservatives dislike, starting with her work in 1974 for the House Judiciary Committee, which recommended three articles of impeachment against President Richard M. Nixon. Then she was a board member and by 1978 chairwoman of the Legal Services Corporation, a federally financed independent corporation that provides legal aid to the poor in civil cases and was anathema to the Reagan Administration...

Mrs. Clinton, a Wellesley College political science graduate who served as president of the student government, has had dozens of causes and affiliations, from serving on the board of the Children's Television Workshop, the group that produces "Sesame Street," to heading the American Bar Association's Commission on Women in the Profession.

She worked for the Children's Defense Fund, a Washington-based advocacy group that lobbies on behalf of poor children, after her graduation from law school in 1973. She joined the group's board of directors in 1976 and became chairwoman in 1986.

THE 1992 CAMPAIGN: Political Memo; Backlash for Hillary Clinton Puts Negative Image to Rout

By ROBIN TONER,
Published: September 24, 1992
Barbara Bush is still vastly more popular and better known in the polls, but Hillary Clinton seems to be riding a heady backlash from the Republican convention these days. Her crowds are big, her portrait on the cover of Time magazine this month was downright beatific, and months of careful maneuvering to recast her image may be finally paying off.

Mrs. Clinton, who dislikes and dismisses the notion that there was ever a strategy to warm her up, says she simply realized last spring that voters were getting a one-dimensional portrait of her.

"People started telling me there were polls showing that people didn't even know if Bill and I had a child," she said in a recent interview. "Well, in Arkansas, everybody knows Bill and I have a child, and they know we protect her and we're not keen on having her made into an object. But then I realized, that's the most important part of my life, and people don't know that about me.

"It wasn't that I changed," she said. "It was that I grew in my understanding of how better to communicate what I care about and who I am."

For much of the 1992 campaign, the endlessly ballyhooed "year of the woman" never quite extended to Mrs. Clinton. Her poll ratings were measured against Mrs. Bush's and found lacking. Her defense of her legal career last spring -- an angry "I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies" -- made even some Democrats wince. At least 20 articles in major publications this year involved some comparison between Mrs. Clinton and a grim role model for political wives: Lady Macbeth.

DEMOCRATS IN NEW YORK; A Softer Image for Hillary Clinton

By ALESSANDRA STANLEY,
Published: July 13, 1992
A high school student in Conway, Ark., asked Hillary Clinton a question that has bedeviled her husband's Presidential campaign for months. He wanted to know what her role would be in a Clinton Administration.

Mrs. Clinton's answer was a preview of the kind of performance she intends to give at the Democratic National Convention. "I want to be a voice for children in the White House," she said softly.

"A voice for children," a First Lady-like phrase that Mrs. Clinton has used increasingly of late, sounds as worthy and unobjectionable as Nancy Reagan's "just say no" campaign against drugs or Barbara Bush's literacy projects.

The label is well suited to Mrs. Clinton's experience as a longtime advocate of children's rights, but it is also carefully tailored to match voters' expectations of what is appropriate work for the President's wife. Recipes and Child-Rearing

After a series of gaffes that made her a lightning rod for critics, Mrs. Clinton retreated from the national stage after the New York primary. She returns to the floodlights of Madison Square Garden with her public persona fine-tuned.

She is as corny as Kansas in August as she discusses recipes, child-rearing and the Fourth of July. The Clintons no longer talk, even jokingly, of having Mrs. Clinton serve in the Cabinet. The couple's early "buy-one-get-one-free" approach soured when voters began viewing Mrs. Clinton as a hardheaded careerist who dominated her mate and seemed contemptuous of ordinary housewives. Ruefully, she acknowledged she had learned, the hard way, that Americans seem to believe that "choices are O.K. for everybody except the President's wife."