In the Los Angeles debate on Thursday, Barack Obama buried his own lede. Many pundits said that Hillary seemed to command the healthcare debate while Barack won the Iraq debate. But Barack buried his own lede. Hillary's botching of her votes on War Authorization and the Levin Amendment are analogous to her botching the Healthcare Task Force of 1993.
Barack made the argument that judgement is more critical than experience in a President. But he made it too late. He should have made that argument on healthcare and pointed to Hillary's failure in 1993. She points to her experience as a stength. He should have pointed to it as a weakness. In doing so, he would have made the theme of the evening: Right on Day One.
More below...
Here is Barack's argument on the Iraq war, which came late in the debate...
http://www.iht.com/...
The reason that this is important again is that Senator Clinton, I think, fairly has claimed that she's got the experience on day one. And part of the argument that I'm making in this campaign is that it is important to be right on day one -- (cheers, applause) -- and that the judgment that I've presented, on this issue and some other issues, is relevant to how we're going to make decisions in the future.
You know, it's not a function just of looking backwards. It's a function of looking forwards, and how are we going to be able to make a series of decisions in a very dangerous world? I mean, the terrorist threat is real. And precisely because it's real, and we've got finite resources, we don't have the capacity to just send our troops in anywhere we decide without good intelligence, without a clear rationale. That's the kind of leadership that I think we need from the next President of the United States.
And here is Chris Dodd back in September, lamenting the fact that Hillary uses her healthcare failure as a strength...
http://tpmelectioncentral.com/...
Chris Dodd has a tough critique of Hillary Clinton's recent health care rollout: She bungled the issue last time.
"It should be far more than just a parable of personal growth and maturation. This was about an issue that was critically important to the county," Dodd said of Hillary's 1993 health care effort. "It was a major effort that failed. There were a lot of reasons that it failed, not the least of which it was mismanaged terribly at the time."
And as for Hillary's talk about how she's fought on the issue and has the metaphorical scars from the battle, Dodd doesn't give her that, either: "Not everyone succeeds in everything they try to do. But if you're going to highlight experiences, they ought to reflect the ability to produce results rather than what you tried and failed at."
Beyond that Hillary's experiecne on the task force shows her penchant for secrecy and political expedience... habits that are hard to break.
http://www.dailykos.com/...
"These documents paint a disturbing picture of how Hillary Clinton and the Clinton administration approached health care reform – secrecy, smears, and the misuse of government computers to track private and political information on citizens," said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. "There are millions more documents that the Library has yet to release. The Clintons continue to play games and pretend they have nothing to do with this delay. The Clintons should get out of the way and authorize the release of these records now." ...
A "Confidential" May 26, 1993 Memorandum from Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) to Hillary Clinton entitled, "Health Care Reform Communications," which criticizes the Task Force as a "secret cabal of Washington policy ‘wonks’" that has engaged in "choking off information" from the public regarding health care reform. The memorandum suggests that Hillary Clinton "use classic opposition research" to attack those who were excluded by the Clinton Administration from Task Force deliberations and to "expose lifestyles, tactics and motives of lobbyists" in order to deflect criticism. Senator Rockefeller also suggested news organizations "are anxious and willing to receive guidance [from the Clinton Administration] on how to time and shape their [news] coverage."
Given Hillary's divisive activities during her work on the 1993 Task force, Obama should have restated his previous argument about Clinton's "experience."
http://www.time.com/...
Clinton's opponents aimed their own criticisms less at any aspect of her message than at the messenger herself. Obama suggested, without naming her, that Clinton would be too divisive a figure to achieve such a difficult political feat: "The real key to passing any health care reform is the ability to bring people together in an open, transparent process that builds a broad consensus for change." Senator Chris Dodd was blunter: "While she talks about the political scars she bears, the personal scars borne by the American people are far greater. The mismanagement of the effort in 1993 and 1994 has set back our ability to move toward universal health care immeasurably."
The only way that meaningful healthcare reform is going to happen is with a "transformational" presidency that will bring together democrats and reasonable independents and republicans to meet the needs of the vast majority of our people. Barack has been talking about doing this since he first came on the national scene at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.
http://www.pbs.org/...
Yet even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there's not a liberal America and a conservative America -- there's the United States of America. There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America. The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I've got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.
On Healthcare Policy or on Foreign Policy, experience means nothing if it is afflicted by the mindset that leads to failure. As Barack said, it is most important to be right on day one. If Barack is going to get to "Day One" he's got to remember to remind us of who has a lot of experience being wrong on day one.