Friday, January 25, 2008

Former Insiders And Others Growing Tired of Billary's Sleazy Tactics

I have commented a number of times now on my growing disgust with the Clinton campaign's resort to lies and dirty tactics in its efforts to thwart the challenge posed by Barack Obama. With every passing day, Bill and Hillary Clinton - or Billary if you will - are giving a preview of what another Clinton term in the White House would look like and it is NOT pretty.


Now former insiders from Bill Clinton's administration and others are joining the chorus of those being driven away and potentially made more reluctant to vote for Hillary if she ends up as the Democrat nominee. These tactics ultimately will only help the GOP and serve to remind independents of the high sleaze factor that has always surrounded Bill Clinton. It is precisely this factor that caused me to vote against Clinton when he was running for his second term. Hillary likewise seems Hell bent to force me to hold my nose and vote for the GOP if it is a rational Republican or her. The following is from former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich's personal blog (http://robertreich.blogspot.com/2008/01/bill-clintons-old-politics.html) and it sums up well the problem with another Clinton term in the White House:


I write this more out of sadness than anger. Bill Clinton’s ill-tempered and ill-founded attacks on Barack Obama are doing no credit to the former President, his legacy, or his wife’s campaign. Nor are they helping the Democratic party. While it may be that all is fair in love, war, and politics, it’s not fair – indeed, it’s demeaning – for a former President to say things that are patently untrue (such as Obama’s anti-war position is a “fairy tale”) or to insinuate that Obama is injecting race into the race when the former President is himself doing it. Meanwhile, the attack ads being run in South Carolina by the Clinton camp which quote Obama as saying Republicans had all the ideas under Reagan, is disingenuous. For years, Bill Clinton and many other leading Democrats have made precisely the same point – that starting in the Reagan administration, Republicans put forth a range of new ideas while the Democrats sat on their hands. Many of these ideas were wrong-headed and dangerous, such as supply-side economics. But for too long Democrats failed counter with new ideas of their own; they wrongly assumed that the old Democratic positions and visions would be enough. Clinton’s 1992 campaign – indeed, the entire “New Democratic” message of the 1990s – was premised on the importance of taking back the initiative from the Republicans and offering Americans a new set of ideas and principles. Now, sadly, we’re witnessing a smear campaign against Obama that employs some of the worst aspects of the old politics.
Joe Klein at Time magazine had this to say about the Clintons (http://www.time-blog.com/swampland/2008/01/are_you_kidding_me.html):
In a desperate move--unprecedented for an ex-President in American politics--Bill Clinton decides to impede Obama's momentum by inserting himself into the campaign. He attacks Obama on an almost daily basis, sometimes falsely. He makes a spectacle of himself. And then he blames the press for not covering the substance of the campaign?
I can't believe that Hillary Clinton wants the world to think that whenever she gets into political trouble, she's going to have her husband come roaring about, breaking furniture, sucking up oxygen, spewing carbon dioxide. My impression is that she's strong enough to defend herself--she certainly showed that in the recent Democratic debate. But apparently she's not strong enough to control Mr. Bill...and if that's the case, any sane voter would have to think twice before enabling this sort of circus act in the White House.

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