Friday, September 14, 2007

HILLARY CLINTON

The HillaryCare Reservations Mythology

In the “HillaryCare Mythology” article by Paul Starr that Jonah references, Starr writes:

In a meeting with me in her office during the administration's second week, she spoke of "my husband's plan" and thanked me for an article of mine, which she said was helpful in explaining the approach. Whether she fully agreed with that approach, I wasn't sure. But if she had her reservations, she put them aside and, believing strongly in the aims of reform, worked hard to achieve them.

Starr lost me here. Does anyone honestly believe that Hillary Clinton disagreed with the approach of the plan that she was heading up and proposing to Congress? Is she really such a shrinking violet that she wouldn’t express her objections or doubts to her husband? Come on. This completely doesn’t jive with the too-determined portrait that former Senator Bill Bradley (D-N.J.) painted to Carl Bernstein:

Perhaps some substantive changes might be required in the interest of realism, Bradley suggested.

 

No, Hillary responded icily, there would be no changes because delay or not, the White House would “demonize” members of Congress and the medical establishment who would use the interim to alter the administration’s plan or otherwise stand in its way.

 

“That was it for me in terms of Hillary Clinton,” Bradley said many years later. “You don’t tell members of the Senate you are going to demonize them. It was obviously so basic to who she is. The arrogance. The assumption that people with questions are enemies. The disdain. The hypocrisy.”

We're supposed to believe that Hillary harbored doubts about the plan widely called HillaryCare, but played not just good soldier, but overzealous soldier to promote her husband's plan, and took all the blame when they failed to get a majority of supporters in a Democratic-controlled Congress? Why fight tooth and nail for a plan she allegedly secretly saw as flawed?

09/14 12:03 PMShare