Hillary’s Voice

Clinton Unveils Plan to Ease Housing Crisis (Washington Post)
On Monday, Clinton laid out a plan in Philadelphia aimed at slowing mounting foreclosures, renewing her call for greater lender transparency and for $30 billion in assistance for individual homeowners and communities to help most Americans through the credit crunch. Clinton used a speech at the University of Pennsylvania to argue that the federal government should apply the same kind of resources to assist individuals as it did in bailing out investment giant Bear Stearns. “Let’s be clear: When families are losing their homes, that’s also a financial crisis,” Clinton said… Aides to Obama responded by saying Clinton was simply echoing proposals offered by their candidate and by accusing her of hypocrisy on the issue because she had accepted contributions from the mortgage lending industry. Obama has offered a $10 billion relief package.

Clinton ‘misspoke’ about ‘96 Bosnia trip
WASHINGTON - Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign said she “misspoke” last week when saying she had landed under sniper fire during a trip to Bosnia as first lady in March 1996. She later characterized the episode as a “misstatement” and a “minor blip.”

Both Obama And Clinton Embellish Their Roles (Washington Post)
After weeks of arduous negotiations, on April 6, 2006, a bipartisan group of senators burst out of the “President’s Room,” just off the Senate chamber, with a deal on new immigration policy. As the half-dozen senators — including John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) — headed to announce their plan, they met Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), who made a request common when Capitol Hill news conferences are in the offing: “Hey, guys, can I come along?” And when Obama went before the microphones, he was generous with his list of senators to congratulate — a list that included himself… To Senate staff members, who had been arriving for 7 a.m. negotiating sessions for weeks, it was a galling moment. Those morning sessions had attracted just three to four senators a side, Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) recalled, each deeply involved in the issue. Obama was not one of them. But in a presidential contest involving three sitting senators, embellishment of legislative records may be an inevitability, Specter said with a shrug.
Obama has taken credit for other people’s work a lot.  All the way back, oh (not) so many years ago, to his days in the Illinois senate.  See below.

Obama, Emil Jones and Earmarks (by Jeralyn Merritt at Talk Left)
Barack Obama frequently cites his impressive record as an Illinois state legislator as an indicator of his experience in running for President. Turns out, according to former Chicago reporter Todd Spivak, all of his legislative accomplishments were in his final 7th year and were handed to him by his mentor, Ill. State Senate President Emil Jones… “Jones appointed Obama sponsor of virtually every high-profile piece of legislation, angering many rank-and-file state legislators who had more seniority than Obama and had spent years championing the bills.”

Double Negative (by David Greenberg at The New Republic)
[T]he charge that Clinton is Nixonian is as scurrilous as the smears that Obama is a closet Muslim or that John McCain sired a bastard child. Her campaign, simply put, is not categorically different from any other hard-driving presidential bid, including Obama’s own. It should be recalled that, back in the fall, when Obama trailed in the polls by double digits, friendly columnists positively begged him to go after the front-runner. In an October 30 debate, Obama charged that Clinton was “changing positions whenever it’s politically convenient” and that “she has not been truthful” about her Social Security plans. The jibes grew so strident that Bill Richardson called a time-out in the middle of the debate, declaring, “It’s pretty close to personal attacks that we don’t need.” The point isn’t to taunt, as if in the schoolyard, that Obama “started it”; the point is that no presidential aspirant enters the arena an innocent. Both candidates have flip-flopped, ducked questions, taken potshots, made dubious campaign promises, and spun the facts in disingenuous ways. They have done so for the same reason that fish swim and birds fly: It’s in the nature and job description of politicians to do so. To plead that one or the other has done these things more, or more nefariously, is to launch a litany of tit-for-tat charges that would outrun the pages of this magazine.

Monica’s Blue Dress - 2008 (by cjbardy at MyDD)
As I recall, Monica Lewinsky and her “blue dress” have not been an issue for about eight years. So, you can imagine my surprise when I check out The Page - by Mark Halperin - Time and read that Obama Senior Advisor Gordon Fischer decided that now would be a good time to remind us about it… Can someone please explain to me why rehashing an event from nearly a decade ago is at all relevant to bolster a stab at Bill Clinton that even Obama’s own campaign has already denounced? If someone could, I would be greatly appreciative. The hypocrisy in Obama’s campaign makes me feel like my head is about to explode!

Front-Runners Don’t Go Negative (by alegre at MyDD)
[Barack Obama’s] “full assault” on Hillary’s integrity and character has reached a new peak since Hillary’s victories on March 4th.  One of Sen. Obama’s top surrogates equated President Clinton with Joe McCarthy; another called Hillary a “monster;” and his campaign manager held an angry conference call claiming that Hillary is “deeply flawed” and has “character issues.”  That’s neither unifying nor hopeful.  If Sen. Obama really is the prohibitive favorite some say he is, these negative attacks make absolutely no sense. Why would a frontrunner seek to attack and divide? If Sen. Obama can’t unify Democrats in a primary, how can he unify Americans in a general election?

Barack I-didn’t-know Obama (by mbolack at MyDD)
Vetting our two Democratic presidential candidates has definitely been a mixed bag. On one hand, Hillary Clinton’s life and political history has been in the news and reported online for many years. Barack Obama is another deal. He has essentially gotten a free ride in the national media, only being questioned seriously when the news was so shocking that the mainstream media had no choice but to report it. So I went hunting, and was often surprised at what I found. It amounts to a pattern that I find dismaying…1. He joined and remained active in a church where racism and anti-American hate is routinely preached. He and his family attended, and heavily contributed for about 20 years…2. Senator Obama bought stock in two companies whose investors included his 2004 campaign political donors. One, in fact, was developing medicine to treat avian flu — with the stock purchase coming right before Obama introduced legislation to increase funding to combat the virus…
3. Senator Obama came into politics through the famously corrupt Chicago political machine, with the help of some of the slimiest characters imaginable…

4. According to the Sun-Times, Barack Obama, “allegedly decent guy and agent of change” in Washington, requested an earmark in 2006 for $1 million taxpayer dollars for the University of Chicago Hospitals, where is wife, Michelle Obama, was a vice president. Said hospital, by the way, gave Michelle Obama a huge raise (nearly $200,000, more than doubling her salary) in 2005 after Barack was elected to the United States Senate.
Click through for many more examples, for more detail on these examples, and for many links documenting Obama’s knownothingness.

The Shape of Things to Come (by Fleaflicker at No Quarter)
[From Barack Obama’s latest book, The Audacity of Hope:] “I am new enough on the national political scene that I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views. As such, I am bound to disappoint some, if not all, of them.” You see, Senator Obama believes that if enough people project their views of what he should be onto him that he will be able to take advantage of their ignorance and become elected to the highest office of the most powerful nation on earth. That is the more subtle message to what Obama states plainly. But he won’t tell you that because doing so would cause you to wake up and realize that he is just taking advantage of your hope and your faith in him to hoodwink you into giving him the reins to power.

Swift Boating the Speech (by John Heilemann, New York Magazine)
Obama’s speech did nothing to defuse an issue that Republicans clearly intend to beat him senseless with this fall—assuming that, as seems increasingly likely, he secures the Democratic nomination. Quite the contrary. In GOP circles, the incendiary video clips of Obama’s former pastor are seen, not surprisingly, as a gift that will keep on giving… The hard guys of the Republican Party have no intention of trying to paint the hope- monger as a closet black nationalist. They intend to portray him as insufficiently allegiant to his nation. They will weave together Wright’s “God damn America” with Michelle Obama’s statement that this is the “first time” she has been “proud of my country,” Obama’s eschewal of the American-flag lapel pin, and a piece of video that captures him standing at a campaign event without his hand over his heart during the national anthem. And, in fact, a trio of right-wing activists have already thrown together a video doing just that: For a picture of what the fall campaign will look like, just go to YouTube and type in “Is Obama Wright?”

The Democrats’ anti-momentum (by Walter Shapiro, Salon)
With the chances to rerun the outlaw Michigan and Florida primaries now at the vanishing point, it may be time to inquire about a do-over for the rest of America. This is not an argument for Clinton, who otherwise probably has too far to go and too few remaining primaries to get there. But after a week punctuated by Obama’s right-stuff response to wrong-way Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Clinton’s document dump of today-tea-was-served White House schedules, Democrats are being barraged with new information about the candidates long after most of them have made a binding decision on a nominee. It is akin to being given a subscription to Consumer Reports the day after you bought a new car… With more than five months to the Denver Convention, the problem for the Democrats remains the crazy-quilt schedule that caused far too many to vote too soon. That is the real buyer’s remorse — a front-loaded political calendar that has turned most partisan Democrats into now-irrelevant bystanders just when a real decision is needed.
Shapiro says we need a national do-over, not just in Florida and Michigan.  I agree, but we wouldn’t need one if the media had done its job from the beginning and really vetted Obama, instead of treating him as a phenomenon.

Clinton Backer Points to Electoral College Votes as New Measure
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana, who backs Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton for president, proposed another gauge Sunday by which superdelegates might judge whether to support Mrs. Clinton or Senator Barack Obama… So far, Mrs. Clinton has won states with a total of 219 Electoral College votes, not counting Florida and Michigan, while Mr. Obama has won states with a total of 202 electoral votes.

So Who Do the DEMOCRATS Want for a Nominee? (by campskunk at MyDD)
Last month there were two interesting tabulations of the results so far in the primaries. We have seen all the tabulations of the popular vote and the arguments about who’s ahead, but these two were different. They counted the DEMOCRATIC vote. That’s right- the votes by actual, card-carrying Democrats in Democratic primaries… Bottom Line? Here are the total votes cast by DEMOCRATS so far… Hillary 10,588,689, Obama 9,816,876… OK, you can all screech away and attack the methodology, now that you’ve decided you don’t like the results. And remember RULE ZERO, as lambert over at Corrente says: Rule Zero: Any rule that purports to impede Obama’s selection as Democratic nominee is not really a rule.

Lots more really good stuff at MakeThemAccountable.com.

Carolyn Kay
MakeThemAccountable.com