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 Bleeding Heartland

Who do you want answering the phone at 3 am?

Hillary Clinton started running this ad, which suggests that Obama is not up to the job of handling international crises:

I don’t think this is a great ad. I understand the experience argument, and I do think Hillary is more experienced, but it hasn’t worked against Obama up to now, and I don’t see why this ad changes the game.

Obama hit back with this ad, which positions Obama as the candidate with superior judgment, because he opposed the Iraq War from the start:

I am not impressed with this ad either. I am tired of hearing Obama coast on a speech he gave five years ago. First of all, he took that speech off his website in 2003, when the war seemed to be going well. Second, his Senate voting record on all things connected to Iraq is EXACTLY THE SAME AS HILLARY CLINTON’S.

As a U.S. Senator, Obama has not shown superior judgment on Iraq compared to Clinton. He has stood on the sidelines while other senators tried to defund the war. I am not buying his claim to superior judgment on matters of foreign policy.

Probably Obama will get the better of this skirmish, because as usual, the media uncritically pass along his claim to superior judgment. I have never seen a single tv analyst point out that since getting elected to the Senate, Obama has done nothing more to end the war than Clinton has.

UPDATE: Jeralyn at Talk Left put up this excerpt from an interview Obama gave the New Yorker in November 2006:

http://www.newyorker.com/archi…

Where do you find yourself having the biggest differences with Hillary Clinton, politically?

You know, I think very highly of Hillary. The more I get to know her, the more I admire her. I think she’s the most disciplined-one of the most disciplined people-I’ve ever met. She’s one of the toughest. She’s got an extraordinary intelligence. And she is, she’s somebody who’s in this stuff for the right reasons. She’s passionate about moving the country forward on issues like health care and children. So it’s not clear to me what differences we’ve had since I’ve been in the Senate. I think what people might point to is our different assessments of the war in Iraq, although I’m always careful to say that I was not in the Senate, so perhaps the reason I thought it was such a bad idea was that I didn’t have the benefit of U.S. intelligence. And, for those who did, it might have led to a different set of choices. So that might be something that sort of is obvious. But, again, we were in different circumstances at that time: I was running for the U.S. Senate, she had to take a vote, and casting votes is always a difficult test.

Obama basically came right out and said that if he’d been in the Senate, he would have done the same thing as Hillary on the AUMF vote.

Tags: 2008 Elections, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton

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desmoinesdem

9 Comments

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  • Let's all be a cynic

    so we don’t have to believe in anything except the fallibility of our government.  That’s what I propose.  Forget judgment, forget experience, forget ideology.  Let’s just be perfect.  Yeah, universal healthcare; let’s force everyone to buy government healthcare because the government is so efficient at what it does we also want it running our healthcare system.    Who do you want up late at night on the big bad red phone making last minute deals preventing our country from getting nuked?  The person who voted for us to go to war or the person who spoke out against us going to war?  What’s more virtuous, following the pack or speaking out against the pack?  Blah, blah…I buy this, I don’t buy that; our country needs this – no, it doesn’t need that!  I want my investments to be free of tax, no you must be taxed 30% and possibly more on everything you invest.  Let’s spread out all our wealth, give it away, take from the rich, give to the poor, yeah, it will all turn out much better in the end.  Let’s have a revolution?  Replace one crooked man with another.  What’s the difference?  You keep criticizing what is good for the country, you keep on perpetuating the cynicism and the politics of old.  The more you follow Clinton and reject the Obama movement the more you reject the wave of the future; the more you condemn the Democratic Party.  Oh, but what good is a candidate if not a candidate that bleeds universal healthcare, no matter the quality of such universal healthcare – we must have universal healthcare!!!  Oh yes, all must pay for healthcare even if they can’t afford it, so they can be afforded the opportunity to be assessed with the best technology science has to offer.  If we don’t do that, they might die sooner than otherwise.  If they die sooner because we didn’t have universal healthcare, we’ll feel it’s our fault – we could have done more.  Yet, we all die in the end.  So, what is more, what is too little, and what is too much?  You ask so much, but you also ask the impossible.  This is the blindness of you bitter partisan political heads.  You only know what you think is right, but you see nothing beyond your own two feet.  It’s not let’s do the best we can with the cards we’re dealt, let’s do the best we can by stealing the cards from our partners.  Oh well, such is life.  

    Obama is riding his anti-Iraq War speech to victory and opponents are bitterly lementing over his using of it in such a way.  It’s sad.  Yes, it really is.  A man spoke out on an issue, a woman voted on an issue; blame one, blame the other; neither is right, neither is wrong; we’re all just right or wrong depending on what it means either way to the reader.  She had “evidence”, he had “judgment”.  Yada yada.  

    Your criticism makes a mockery of the system.  Whether you think that is good or bad is up to you.   Oh, “it’s the media’s fault Obama is not being critiqued well enough” and well, Clinton is being critiqued too well.  Wait, but wait, why would Clinton be criticized so heavily?  Let’s think.  She is a former first lady, her husband is well-hated by nearly half of the country and the Clintons never were friendly with the media.  The media has gone along with the change mantra that Obama represents, and whether or not that is purely progressive (as your savior, Krugman, would have us believe is the purpose of all human existence) doesn’t matter; and, this angers you because you actually think Hillary or Edwards COULD make a difference, when in fact they would have so little unifying capability that they would put the system into disuse and degeneration.   Honestly, another Clinton in the White House?  in place of a populist Obama?  What kind of horrendous damage would that have on the Democratic Party if she wins?  The Party would  ultimately fail in the general election.  

    The whole point of a democratic system is that change happens.  That is why Obama is doing so well.  People recognize something new is needed.  Even if Obama is not perfect, which everyone knows he is not, he is someone new that can bring new light and a new face to issues that face our country’s government.  If we keep electing our putting the same names on the ballots, what’s the point?  Let’s just develop an aristocracy or monarchy.  That would be much easier and straightforward.  Wouldn’t it be joyful?  Hopefully it would be your progressive aristocrats that do well.  But, then again, democracy is only good when it’s your people in charge, so changing the system doesn’t sound like a bad idea at all.  

    Bleh.  I don’t know how you can write about the same thing over and over.  Everyone needs universal healthcare, but no one on these blogs offers any clue how to get there.  They expect saviors to arrive out of the political abyss and they shine their illuminating blogolight on them and hope the world becomes the progressive world they hope it will become.  I’m tired of it.  You all say the same thing, ” I dedicate my life to this cause (in the majestic words of the John Edwards we all glorify), POVERTY MUST END!”  But, we have no clue how, or if it is even realistic.  How can we end poverty?  Come on.  Give me a real answer, not just that we have to elect John Edwards, the good miller’s son.  I want to hear some answers.  And, even then supposing you think there is success in ending poverty at some point, how do you propose getting everyone out of poverty?  Just going to put them all in the middle class?  

    Let’s just do the best we can and not let our country decay from lack of turnover and freshness.  You put Clinton back in office and you ruin our country.  That’s as simple as it gets.      

    drinksgreentea  Sat 1 Mar 3:24 AM

    • Sorry

      You should read the updated version at http://politaltea.com, if you are going to read it.  There are some mistakes in this draft.

      -DrinksGreenTea

      drinksgreentea  Sat 1 Mar 3:45 AM

    • typical Obama supporter missing the point

      of what I wrote.

      Obama’s record since getting elected to the Senate (e.g. voting for several Iraq War supplemental funding bills despite having said in 2004 that Congress should stand up to Bush on this issue) suggests to me that if he’d been in the Senate in 2002, he would have voted for the AUMF, just like most of the Democrats.

      You mischaracterize the Clinton and Edwards health care plans. You simply do not understand this issue if you think they were advocating that everyone buy a government-run plan.

      The public option that everyone has the option of buying into is an essential piece of any good health care reform, as is the mandate. Don’t take my word for it, look at analysis from experts at the Urban Institute:

      http://www.urban.org/publicati…

      In this brief we conclude that, absent a single payer system, it is not possible to achieve universal coverage without an individual mandate. The evidence is strong that voluntary measures alone would leave large numbers of people uninsured. Voluntary measures would tend to enroll disproportionate numbers of individuals with higher cost health problems, creating high premiums and instability in the insurance pools in which they are enrolled, unless further significant government subsidization is provided. The government would also have difficulty redirecting current spending on the uninsured to offset some of the cost associated with a new program without universal coverage.

      Introduction

      Our contention that an individual mandate is critical to achieving universal coverage rests upon three points. First, many individuals will not choose to obtain coverage under a purely voluntary system. Second, adverse selection will occur under a voluntary insurance system.Third, it is politically difficult to redirect current government spending on care for the uninsured to offset the costs associated with new broad-based reforms unless the full population is insured.

      Evidence on Voluntary Participation. There is abundant evidence that without an individual mandate a health reform would fall well short of achieving universal coverage.As part of the work that we did early in the debate over universal coverage in Massachusetts,we showed that voluntary approaches without an employer or individual mandate would only cover about 40 percent of the uninsured; adding an employer mandate would still leave about 50 percent of the uninsured without coverage. We found that Massachusetts could achieve universal coverage only with an individual mandate, even when we assumed relatively generous subsidies provided to those with incomes up to 400 percent of the FPL, government-sponsored reinsurance for high-cost cases in the private nongroup and small-group (fewer than 100 workers) markets, and an organized purchasing pool.

      Other analysts have reached similar conclusions. In a study that analyzed health reform options for the state of New York, the Lewin Group found that voluntary measures including a public expansion and subsidized buy-in to a state health plan reduced the number of uninsured by 29 percent.Adding an employer mandate (but not an individual mandate) to these voluntary measures reduced the number of uninsured by 36 percent. In an analysis extending the Massachusetts type plan to the United States, Jon Gruber found that voluntary measures, including income-related subsidies and a purchasing arrangement, would reduce the number of uninsured by about 50 percent.

      Opponents of an individual mandate argue that they can come close to universal coverage with a combination of income-related subsidies, more options for purchasing affordable coverage (e.g., through purchasing pools), and administrative mechanisms for facilitating enrollment in insurance. The most recent data indicate that there are 47 million uninsured people in the United States. Even if subsidies, benefits, and administrative simplifications are sufficient to reach two-thirds of the uninsured (a reach beyond what any study to date has shown for a voluntary system), this would still leave 15.5 million people uninsured.This would be admirable, but would be considerably less than full coverage, and, as health care costs and insurance premiums increase, these numbers could easily erode unless further government dollars were injected into the system.

      desmoinesdem  Sat 1 Mar 8:02 AM

      • This Paper

        Do you have access to the articles that this article cites?  This article basically sums up a pro-mandate position and cites former articles that the same authors wrote, which I assume contains the actual research.  It’s not a sign of good research if you only quote yourself and those who agree with you.  I can’t accept the author’s arguments just because it’s a published article.  I need some proof that they compared their research-supported arguments with others and successfully show that their argument is correct.  

        drinksgreentea  Sat 1 Mar 1:06 PM

    • you made me laugh with "populist Obama"

      by the way.

      Many polls have shown that Obama is seen even by Democratic primary voters as aloof and less concerned about “the problems of people like me” than Clinton, not to mention Edwards.

      That’s a problem Obama will need to address for the general election.

      desmoinesdem  Sat 1 Mar 8:05 AM

    • don't pigeon-hole me as a Clinton supporter

      I am pretty sure I spent more hours during the past year trying to convince real, live voters not to caucus for Clinton than you did.

      I wish she had never run for president, frankly. Then in all likelihood Gore would have gotten in and Obama would have stayed out.

      I simply lack confidence in Obama’s judgment and leadership. To me he is a product of talented oratory, media hype and a good marketing/branding campaign. You think he’s great. At some point we will see who is right.

      desmoinesdem  Sat 1 Mar 8:07 AM

      • Agree with you on

        the Clinton/Gore/Obama dynamics.  I never agreed with the talk about the supposedly great D field of candidates.  The top three candidates (Clinton, Obama, Edwards), and pretty much the whole gang if you think about it, are/were all deeply flawed candidates, especially against McCain. I would be delusional not to admit Obama’s obvious shortcomings as a candidate.  I think it would have been a perfect time for Gore to run.  He would have been by far the strongest candidate we could have fielded (experience, conviction, change from W).

        rf  Sat 1 Mar 1:24 PM

  • Anyway...back to the actual ad

    I thought that was a pretty damning ad. It’s not a new concept, the “Obama is inexperienced” attack…but it was a pretty creative application of that theme.

    The Obama response ad was pretty unnecessary, since Obama himself perfectly deflected that attack with his Iraq argument. Since that soundbite was all over the press, I’m not sure this ad is necessary. Plus since it’s a near exact copycat…people who saw the first ten seconds of the ad and either spaced out or changed channels would think they had seen the Clinton ad.

    Bottom line: Good ad, but too late. The perfect time for this ad would have been after New Hampshire. If it had been running ads like this instead of stump-speech ads, she might be in a different situation. And I fully expect some version of this idea (probably amped up “24” style) to re-appear in the general election.  

    american007  Sat 1 Mar 1:34 PM

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