The Time Hillary Was Right About Obama in 2008

[AdamSmith]

The Time Hillary Was Right About Obama in 2008

Elspeth Reeve 11:01 AM ET

The Atlantic Wire

Some people wondered why Hillary Clinton failed to inspired voters in the 2008 presidential campaign with an explicitly cynical message. Mocking then-Sen. Barack Obama, Clinton said, "I could stand up here and say: let’s just get everybody together, let’s get unified… The sky will open, the light will come down, celestial choirs will be singing, and everyone will know that we should do the right thing, and the world would be perfect." Get real, she said. She'd lived through the 90s. "Maybe I’ve just lived a little long, but I have no illusions about how hard this will be. You are not going to wave a magic wand…" She did not win the Democratic nomination. But, Politico's Glenn Thrush points out, history has proved her right. Even Obama admits his speeches don't work like magic on House Republicans.

Obama himself has explicitly endorsed the no-magic-wands view. "I wish I had a magic wand and could make this all happen on my own," Obama said of congressional inaction on the DREAM Act in 2011. Earlier this year, he complained, "Even though most people agree that I'm being reasonable; that most people agree I'm presenting a fair deal; the fact they don't take it means I should somehow do a Jedi mind meld with these folks and convince them to do what's right."

I told you so, Clinton adviser James Carville says. "His message was 'I can transcend Washington' — her message was 'I can bend it, I can cut through it,'" Carville told Politico. "Guess which one turned out to be right?" Many commentators have urged Obama to show leadership by somehow transcending partisan politics. The New York Times' Maureen Dowd, for example, has pointed to the leadership shown in the movie The American President. But she's also suggested Obama could learn from the Clintons' experience in the '90s. "The Clintons have emerged stronger on the back end of their scandals," Dowd said. "America’s ultimate survivors are now truly potent or dangerous, depending on how you look at it, because Americans love them Bridget Jones-style, just the way they are, warts and all." In fact, Clinton learned so much as first lady that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid thinks she'd be able to top Bill Clinton's performance. "I think that they’re a pretty good team, but she’ll handle things probably even better than he did," Reid told PBS.

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2013/08/time-hillary-was-right-about-obama-2008/67862/

[TotallyOz]

Adam, it is quite funny that every taxi drive I meet in Thailand that knows how to speak English talks about Bill and Hillary. They say she is going to be a great President. I agree with them. I can't wait till she gets into office and starts busting some balls.

[RA1]

I don't think it took a crystal ball or even personal experience to make the judgment that the Prez could not fight "city hall". Jimmy as in Carter proved that in recent history during the late '70's. He came to DC thinking he could fight the bureaucracy and change them. He didn't. I was wishing and still do that he could have. Congress is more of the same, only with an office with a nicer view.

Hillary and Bill are without a doubt crooks, but that seems to mean little to the electorate these days. Sorry for us. However, they both have enough money and ex-officio experience that they or she might make a significant difference. One can only hope for the best.

Best regards,

RA1

[AdamSmith]

Hillary Clinton's 2008 slaps still sting President Obama

Obama’s aides say he was never as clueless as Clinton portrayed him. | AP Photo

By GLENN THRUSH | 8/1/13 5:01 AM EDT Updated: 8/1/13 8:17 AM EDT

politico.com

“Friendship” was the main course during Hillary Clinton’s lunch with President Barack Obama this week, according to an Obama spokesman, but no one could have blamed Clinton for ordering a small side of I-told-you-so.

Much of the bombastic campaign rhetoric from 2008 — think “3 a.m. call” — proved as ephemeral as the thousands of half-melted “Hillary” candy bars Clinton’s staff handed out on Super Tuesday five years ago.

But some of Clinton’s most memorable ‘08 shots at Obama have had resonance far beyond the short shelf life of the standard campaign hit parade: her mockery of his vow to transform Washington in his own image, her cry of “elitism” and her skepticism about his managerial chops echo today in the form of GOP attacks and the lingering doubts of some in his own party.

Clinton’s campaign attacks on Obama may have been an exaggerated version of reality, but in retrospect they were illuminating, in the way a hand grenade provides a flash of light before going boom.

Former Clinton staffers didn’t want to be within a mile of this story. (“I’m hanging up now,” said one top ’08 campaign aide cheerfully before the line went dead.) But several more intrepid ex-aides pointed to one quote in particular: a Clinton broadside delivered in Toledo, Ohio, on Feb. 24, 2008, that represented her most stinging attack on Obama’s core hope-and-change message.

“I could stand up here and say: let’s just get everybody together, let’s get unified,” Clinton said, voice dripping with contempt long since discarded.

“The sky will open, the light will come down, celestial choirs will be singing, and everyone will know that we should do the right thing, and the world would be perfect,” Clinton added. “Maybe I’ve just lived a little long, but I have no illusions about how hard this will be. You are not going to wave a magic wand…”

It was caricature — but a little prescient too. In 2012, Obama downplayed his soaring change-Washington mantra, replacing it with a very Hillary ’08 focus on the economy, competence and rationality – the stuff of incumbents and battle-scarred DC veterans. Exactly what Clinton had been four years earlier.

Longtime Clinton adviser James Carville, who was in close touch with the Clinton family during the rocky ’08 primaries, says Obama has come to recognize what Hillary Clinton had already learned during her eight tough years in the White House: Transcendental politics works on a campaign, but not so much when it comes to governing.

“His message was “I can transcend Washington’ — her message was ‘I can bend it, I can cut through it.’ Guess which one turned out to be right?” Carville said.

“I got nothing against the president and his people. Hell, when [bill] Clinton came to Washington, he believed that stuff too. … But the system in Washington devours everything. It always wins. The power of it is awesome to watch. Hillary understood that [in 2008], and he gets it now.”

Obama’s aides say he was never as clueless as Clinton — or any of his subsequent critics — portrayed him. Voters need inspiration, not just perspiration, and he was hoping his message would spur the GOP to compromise, they say.

“You don’t go out in a campaign and sell a B-plus, you go out and give people an ideal,” said Tommy Vietor, a former National Security Council spokesman who was a mainstay of Obama’s 2008 campaign press operation. “I think that was — and is — a key part of what made the president so successful. … And he didn’t know that the GOP leadership would make derailing progress their one and only priority.”

Many of Clinton’s claims have turned out to be total duds — especially on foreign policy, where Obama has proven to be less the doe-eyed naif than the cautious caretaker who signed off on Afghanistan troop withdrawals only after approving one final military surge.

But comments about his overall approach to governing have been more durable, and frequently re-purposed by Republicans.

“There’s a big difference between us — speeches versus solutions, talk versus action,” Clinton said, also in the make-or-break month of February 2008. “Speeches don’t put food on the table. Speeches don’t fill up your tank, or fill your prescription, or do anything about that stack of bills that keeps you up at night.”

A more pointed, and more controversial, statement came in late January 2008, when Clinton questioned Obama’s ability to control Congress — with a comparison of Martin Luther King and President Johnson, which many Obama backers took to be a veiled racial swipe.

“Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act,” Clinton told Fox News on the eve of Obama’s blowout win in the African-American-dominated South Carolina primary.

“It took a president to get it done,” she added.

In the short term, Clinton’s quip was a classic rhetorical boomerang, cleverly stoked by Obama’s staff and surrogates who did little to discourage the implication that it revealed the candidate’s hidden feelings on race. But the negative comparisons to LBJ have intensified over the years, much to the chagrin of Obama’s staff.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/08/barack-obama-hillary-clinton-2008-campaign-95035.html#ixzz2ajiwqMVO

[axiom2001]

Adam, it is quite funny that every taxi drive I meet in Thailand that knows how to speak English talks about Bill and Hillary. They say she is going to be a great President. I agree with them. I can't wait till she gets into office and starts busting some balls.

I wish our president would wake up and begin to "burst some balls" and "kick ass" endlessly in order to fulfill his promises of 2008. His progressive political stance which he professed has not been seen and has been indeed horrifically disappointing!!!!

[AdamSmith]

Obstructionist Republicans in Congress are a big part of Obama's problem, to be sure. But another part of it seems to be that he just does not enjoy arm-wrestling with Congress. Whereas Clinton loved it. I read that he (Bill) would spend many evenings from like 6pm to 9pm on the phone with House members and senators, working them and horse-trading and so on to get legislation through that he wanted.

The health care bill is, to my thinking, better than nothing. But if LBJ had wanted a public option in such a bill, you can bet he would have gotten it. Congressmen coming out of a meeting with LBJ would be met with a standing joke: "Well, did he get you in a half-Johnson or a full-Johnson?"