Clinton: Obama is Untested, Like Bush updated
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| Photo: David Kohl/Associated Press Clinton Slams Obama VIDEO |
To add a comment about the video, this is the type of attack that works. It’s not a staged negative attack. It’s anger from the heart about an issue Clinton is passionate about. This works.
… an untested George W. Bush called for change–just as Obama is now–and
“the American people got shafted.” Can’t argue with that
one. Clinton then segued to Obama’s campaign not living up to his rhetoric. Ya think?
“Shame on you, Barack Obama,” Clinton said angrily when talking
to reporters after a rally in a technical college gym here. “It is time
you ran a campaign consistent with your messages in public. That’s what
I expect from you,” she said, calling on Obama to repudiate and stop
the mailings, which she waved demonstratively.“Meet me in Ohio. Let’s have a debate about your tactics,”
she said, calling the mailings “tactics that are right out of Karl Rove’s
playbook.” … ..
The argument is about Obama’s
inaccuracies on health care and NAFTA. It’s the same old stuff he’s been
doing for a while. Saying he has a “universal” health care plan when
he doesn’t. Obama sending out “Harry & Louise” smears against
Clinton, which continues in Ohio. Now he’s been saying Hillary said NAFTA was a “boon,” which
is false. It was her husband that launched that middle class stink bomb.
… .. Indeed, as Kantor went on to note, Hillary Clinton long held reservations
over the labor and environmental fallouts of the free trade agreement. In
addition, she was, at the time, eager to see her health care reform (not NAFTA)
pushed through Congress. As such, Clinton biographer Sally Bedell Smith writes
in her book “For Love of Politics,” her disapproval of the trade
agreement was both political and philosophical.The economic team and other key advisors, including Mack McLarty, Mickey
Kantor, and David Gergen, were likewise urging Bill to use his momentum
to push or congressional ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA)…Liberal Democrats, including Hillary, opposed it primarily because
it could take jobs away from American workers. But as an advocate of global
economic cooperation, Bill was drawn to its free-trade philosophy.It fell to Mickey Kantor, the U.S. Trade Representative responsible for
implementing NAFTA, to reason with Hillary. One day in August, he sat her
down on a bench behind the White House and tried to strike a compromise.
“I said, ‘If you want to drop NAFTA, we can kill it, but we shouldn’t,’”
Kantor recalled. “I said, ‘The way to do it is to introduce health
care, spend a month on it, and then do NAFTA, then go back to health care.’”
With misgivings, Hillary acquiesced to the proposed sequence.Carl Bernstein, another Clinton biographer, echoed much the same tale during
a recent appearance on CNN.“‘Bill,’” he recalled Hillary Clinton as saying, “‘you are
doing Republican economics when you are doing NAFTA.’ She was against NAFTA.
And if she would somehow come out and tell the real story of what she fought
for in the White House and failed in a big argument with her husband she would
end up moving much closer to those [John] Edwards followers.”So why didn’t we hear such protests from Hillary Clinton during her husband’s
administration?“The whole time that she was first lady,” said Robert Shapiro,
the undersecretary of commerce during the Clinton White House years, “she,
like everybody else…[was] not supposed to deviate from the position of the
administration. There is no freedom of speech in there, and that certainly
applies to a first lady.” … ..Did
Hillary Clinton Really Support NAFTA? Aides, Biographers Say No
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