Chelsea Clinton: How she has grown in less than a year.
Mon Feb 11, 2008 at 12:52:42 PM PDT
My goodness how you've grown and changed! I just saw you on MSNBC advocating public policy that is very basically your mother's health-insurance-for-all platform. I disagree with that platform. I hope that your sound bite doesn't get repeated ad nauseum. And I have a few words for you when you publicly advocate for public policy that is harmful, not helpful, to the estimated one-sixth of the population who go without health insurance.
You are a lovely and beautiful young woman. But when you speak "truth" about health care as an ardent supporter of your mother, who is a Democratic candidate for President of the United States, please check your facts, and know what you are up against. The truth is plain and simple.
We all speak it plainly, and we also reveal the truth in that which we dare not say. And, then, there is the situation where we omit the truth because we aren't even thinking of it, or we aren't even aware of it.
How she has grown in just a year!
(Chelsea? I'm talking to you. I'm talking about your mother, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.) Please pay attention. Here is what your mother said just a bit less than a year ago:
[Source: 2007 AFSCME Democratic primary debate in Carson City Nevada, Feb 21, 2007]
Q: Many experts project that it would cost between $90 billion and $120 billion to actually achieve universal health care for everyone in America. Is comprehensive reform achievable financially?
A:....I want to figure out how we provide universal health care without putting billions more into the system. Let's get prescription drug prices down by negotiating with the drug companies, for example. I am going around the country, and I'm asking people's advice, then I'm going to be proposing a specific plan. You know, President Kennedy said in his inauguration that he wanted to have a man on the moon by the end of the decade. Well, I want to have universal health care coverage by the end of my second term.
Chelsea, there are and always have been legitimate plans that call for the virtual dissolution of so-called U.S. health insurance companies, with health care tax plans that remit lower corporate premium payments to Medicare, with the suspension of all payments by workers. Medicare: The lowest-cost administrative agency worldwide! There is the basic math for a universal health care plan, plain and simple. No, it's not health insurance, but give it five years time, and it will yield undreamed of economic benefits through healthier workers and a sane sustainable society the world will envy. And, the end of malpractice insurance! A raise for the doctors, too! And a warning to malpracticing physicians and their enabling Medical Boards: get out of the business now before you get caught by Uncle Sam! You don't want to ever mess with Uncle Sam when he's in his good governance mode.
And, Chelsea, please, please take the advice of a father who would never accept his daughter's help in publicly advocating for him: Stay out of the business of public politics.
There are several reasons for this warning: Obviously, you will get no respect because you are a young person: witness David Schuster's cheap crack! But when you distort the truth, as you publicly do, knowingly or unknowingly, you will get no sympathy particularly if you are doing so for your mother. There you have it: No respect and no sympathy.
Therefore, I suggest that you stay close to your father. Tone it down. Ask well-wishers, like he did, to "search their conscience, pray," meditate, or whatever they do...but please, please stay out of the fray. Do not re-make the public policy positions of your mother. Leave that to the experts.
I know your mother better than you do in certain respects, and this is one of them. You can't ever convince me that my Senator, who happens to be your mother, will do what she says she will do, for she tells tales out of political expediency! That's simply the nature of politics. We have come to expect that. Witness: Compassionate Conservatism. Hey, for that matter, witness the droll politics of "Hope" and "Yes, We can!" (I will believe it when I see it, but I am willing to give it a shot.)
The perennial question in my mind is this: "Why did it take your mother, then Our Nation's First Lady, more than a year to find her copies of the billing records of her Rose Law Firm work on Whitewater, a failed land deal that brought down a bank but netted its insider executives and it's law firm lawful millions?"
Since that was before your time, you can review it here.
It's so nice that you want to help your mother, but I want to deal directly with her if you don't mind, because she will speak the truth baldly or with with mute force, while I must assume that you might mislead me...maybe unintentionally, of course. Because you are her daughter. And that's to be expected. You will always be her daughter.
What kind of a mother would allow her own privileged daughter to get involved in this very public politics business as a spokesperson? Or was this your own idea?
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. -Mohandas Gandhi
UPDATED: For a clear reference to what I heard, even if MSNBC hasn't put it up on their website yet.
UPDATED II: For clarity and to correct my patronizing tone.
