The Dangers of Hillaryland

One of the many less than honest answers Hillary gave at Wednesday’s debate, was her assertion that she would seek out contrary views from a wide range of sources. The only problem with this rather banal promise is that there is no indication that Hillary has ever approached politics this way. In fact, she is famous for only surrounding herself with loyal staff who rarely question her judgment or decisions.

The idea that Hillary would seek out contrary views and listen to those who disagree with her is laughable given her history. The very term Hillaryland – used to describe her close friends and staff – expresses the idea of a close knit group of people who support and defend Hillary; whose loyalty is clear and unequivocal. In his recent largely favorable bio of Hillary, A Woman In charge, Carl Bernstein describes Hillaryland as “a full-blown culture in which Hillary surrounded herself with people who were loyal to her cause and would do her bidding.”

Bernstein also quotes one time Clinton legal adviser Mark Fabiani on Hillary’s protective bubble:

But the kind of people that were around here were yes people. She had never surrounded herself with people who could stand up to her, who were of a different mind . . . I always thought that was a real tragedy in that if she had had different people around her [who would challenge her] earlier, that maybe some of the things that happened might not have happened.

Hillary the disciplined campaigner knows what platitudes to mouth and what kind of promises to make. But her history fails to match the rhetoric or the professed ideals.

Hillary again wrong on Social Security

Hillary Clinton stubbornly refuses to admit reality on social security. At last nights Democratic debate she once again refused to give any indication of how she will respond to the growing entitlement crisis. She once again used faulty statistics to imply that everything was fine with social security when her husband left office only to be hampered by President Bush.

But this is simply not true as even moderator Tim Russert pointed out. She kept insisting that the magical term “fiscal responsibility” would somehow fix things. But the problem is demographics not the budget. The Baby Boomer’s are going to overwhelm the system and it won’t go away just because you balance the budget.

As I noted before, Ramesh Ponnuru has pointed out how Hillary is trying to spin this:

In recent weeks, she has claimed that when her husband left office, Social Security was projected to be solvent until 2055. She has added that the projection has been cut to 2041 because of President Bush’s fiscal mismanagement.

That’s not right. In 2000, Social Security’s trustees estimated that its trust fund would remain solvent until 2037. (As it happens, I don’t think this trust-fund solvency question is terribly important but for the sake of argument I’ll go with Hillary’s view that it does.) Now it is indeed estimated to be 2041. Under Bush, we’ve gained 4 years rather than lost 14.

Where did Clinton get the year 2055? In the last years of the Clinton administration, Clinton proposed to count the budget surplus toward Social Security and to have the government invest the Social Security funds in the stock market. It claimed that these moves would get us to 2055. Critics said the plan was based on accounting gimmicks that wouldn’t really make Social Security more secure. Whoever was right, the administration’s plan didn’t make it through Congress.

The other candidates flat out admitted that they would need to raise taxes if you take cost saving measures off the table. Having already pandered to the elderly and taken any cost cutting measures off the table now Hillary wants to pretend that she won’t have to raise taxes.

Trying to have it both ways, that is Hillary’s specialty.

Hillary Flip-Flops at debate

The New York Daily News has the details:

“It cannot be American policy, period,” Clinton (D-N.Y.) told debate moderator Tim Russert, who asked if there should be a presidential exemption to allow the torture of a terror chieftain if authorities knew a bomb was about to go off, but didn’t know where it was.

[. . .]

Last October, Clinton told the Daily News: “If we’re going to be preparing for the kind of improbable but possible eventuality, then it has to be done within the rule of law.”

She said then the “ticking time bomb” scenario represents a narrow exception to her opposition to torture as morally wrong, ineffective and dangerous to American soldiers.

“In the event we were ever confronted with having to interrogate a detainee with knowledge of an imminent threat to millions of Americans, then the decision to depart from standard international practices must be made by the President, and the President must be held accountable,” she said.

Typical Clinton, say what you think the audience wants to hear and reconcile it with your past statements later.

UPDATE: More from Ben Smith at the Politico

Democrats As Snake-Oil Salesmen

Great quote from John Podhoretz on the D’s debate last night:

It struck me as a snake-oil salesman’s convention. Every minute there was another promise to fix another problem that any sensible person at any point on the political spectrum knows perfectly well can’t simply be fixed by dollars alone — universal health care, education, the size of the prison population, AIDS, early childhood development, and on and on. I suppose there are many people in this country who genuinely believe the reason things aren’t better is that government doesn’t do enough or spend enough and that all you need to do is cut the defense budget to make everything equal. And I suppose saying you’re for massive government action in all these areas is incredibly seductive for those people to hear. But it’s not serious. In fact, it’s insulting to their audiences for the candidates to pretend it is serious. It would be like Republican candidates going before pro-life audiences and saying, “When I am president there will be no abortions in this country!” The fact that this was a forum largely dedicated to issues of concern to African-Americans should be a sobering reminder of just how patronizing liberals can be toward black people.

Hillary’s Foreign Policy Tightrope Walk

The New York Times is once again highlighting one of the central themes of the Democratic presidential primary: can Hillary Clinton find a way to appease the virulent ant-war base of her party while still holding on to the centrist hawk reputation she has built up over the years?

The article, Is U.S. Safer Since 9/11? Clinton and Rivals Spar, highlights the jockeying of the D’s to be seen as the most anti-war anti-Bush candidate. Clinton, however, has worked hard to build a reputation as a centrist who isn’t afraid of using military force and who isn’t beholden to the loony left that makes up the base of her party. This reputation give her important credibility with the media and with the intellectuals and policy wonks that support her.

But this is not an easy balance to strike:

In a televised debate on Sunday night, Mrs. Clinton, who has tried to minimize her differences with her rivals on commander-in-chief issues, bluntly disagreed with a main rival, former Senator John Edwards, who had just said that the administration’s so-called war on terror was little more than a slogan.

“I believe we are safer than we were,” Mrs. Clinton said. “We are not yet safe enough, and I have proposed over the last year a number of policies that I think we should be following.”

Nice moderate statement, right? Exactly, so the other candidates pounce:

The campaign of her other chief rival, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, sent supporters and reporters a memorandum on Monday titled “America Is Not Safer Since 9/11,” which cited research from the State Department and other groups that described terrorism as an accelerating threat. Advisers to other candidates, meanwhile, argued yesterday that Mrs. Clinton might be misjudging Democratic primary voters, who are loath to credit the Bush administration with much of anything.

[. . .]

A spokesman for Mr. Edwards, Mark Kornblau, said yesterday: “George Bush’s disastrous foreign policy has made America less safe in the world, according to his own State Department. His long list of failures, topped by the war in Iraq, has left us with more terrorists and fewer allies.”

The article goes on to note that Hillary’s campaign believes that “the vast majority of Democratic primary voters, and Americans, would agree with Senator Clinton.” I am not so sure about that. I would agree that a majority of American’s would probably agree, but I wouldn’t wager that the “vast majority” Democratic primary voters think that way. To them Bush is a greater danger than terrorism; to them the country is well on its way to a theocracy built on the blood of innocents. Somehow I don’t think sensible moderate statements like this are going to go very far.

And there lies Hillary’s problem. How can she compete with Edwards for the anti-war base and yet continue her statesmen like pose? The answer could very well determine the outcome of the primary.

Hillary’s Achilles’ Heel

Philip Klein at the American Spectator has an interesting take on Hillary’s Achilles’ Heel: her confusing positions on the war in Iraq. Klein notes that Edwards and Clinton both voted to authorize the war but Edwards has since admitted that he was wrong while Clinton still refuses to apologize for the vote. This could pose a problem as the race continues because Edwards will use it to attack Hillary:

This will present problems for Clinton on more than one level. Beyond having to defend a vote that is highly unpopular among the Democratic base, her parsing of the issue will reinforce the image of her as a fake, calculating, politician — an image that is the root of her high negativity ratings.

She may still be the frontrunner in the polls, but Hillary Clinton’s vulnerability on the single most important issue to Democratic primary voters represents a fundamental problem in her bid for the party’s nomination.

This will be the challenge for Hillary. Can she appease the rabid anti-war base and still hold her reputation as a moderate internationalist not afraid to use force when necessary? Stay tuned . . .