The Hillary Experience
 

We've got an Obama thread, but I just found an interesting piece of news that is too Hillary-specific to fit there, and yet does not merit its own thread. And so, I present: the Hillary discussion, or, taking a page from her campaign, "Experience".

Let's start off with the bit I found, relating to her "plan" to deal with the housing crisis. As much as many parts of it scare me (the part involving the national coffers), there are aspects of it (retaining an equity share in the property) that actually come from existing programs (first-time buyer down payment assistance). So it's not all a fantasy, and there is some measurable track record for the idea.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23794001/

I can see why it's economically sound, but really fuctup, to bail out industry after industry in this country, while never bothering to bail out the individual Americans hardest hit by the foul-ups of those industries in need of bailing out.


I applaud this (likely too late) strain of the Hillary Experience.

Umm, how is following one bad idea with another a good idea? I'm not happy about the Bear Stearns buyout, but that doesn't mean I'm okay with doing something equally stupid to "balance it out". I do think something needs to be done to rectify things, but I'm not really onboard with wholesale buyout proposals.

I can't find it right now, but a few days ago Hillary proposed some sort of committee to work out a plan to go forward. All well and good, though Obama proposed nearly the same thing one year ago. And, oh by the way, his proposal included leaders from the consumer side of the market, while Hillary proposed getting just the leaders within the mortgage industry together. Yeah, that bunch really did well thinking up the concept of sub-prime mortgages, I'm sure they'll continue to make excellent decisions together.

I didn't like the Bear Stearns bailout just as I was opposed to mortgage industry bailout. I say let the companies who made bad decisions suffer the wrath of their mistakes.

I also don't have a lot of sympathy for people who bought things they couldn't afford.

I am really fed up with having to pay for other people's mistakes!

So where's Obama's panel that he proposed a year ago?


Perhaps Hillary's will never materialize either, but we'll find out in 3 weeks. And then the truth will out more clearly than memories of sniper fire.

Bear Stearns was not bailed out. Bear Stearns' creditors (that would be, ultimately, us as the investors through pensions, 401k plans, and individual direct investments) were bailed out, and bailed out in about the least bailout way is possible.

Not one person at Bear Stearns woke up last week saying "hallelujah, the government sure saved our cookies: thank you taxpayers." If Bear Stearns had been allowed to go bankrupt I think we would very quickly have seen the man in the street lamenting how awful it was that such a thing had been allowed to happen.

I would have preferred that the JP Morgan had been brokered in such a way that the Fed didn't assume any risk but then on the other hand the only reason a deal could be brokered at all was that the market closes on the weekend. In other words, there wasn't really any time for trying to finesse the situation.

No, Bear Stearns was not bailed out. It was all the other investment banks that were bailed out, in a deal to sacrifice one of them in return for the government bailing out the rest.


It was not in the style of post-9/11 airline bailout (i.e., cash handouts), but applying government regulations (or lack thereof) to investment banks that were previously applied only to, for lack of a better term at my tongue tip, commercial banks. But there was a deal, and everyone in the industry and watching the economy recognizes it as a defacto bailout.

I was just responding to the Bear Stearns part. I've heard so many people over the last two weeks say something like "if the government saved Bear Stearns why won't it save people from losing their house?" Missing the fact that Bear Stearns wasn't saved, that millions of individuals were saved from their investments going into bankruptcy court, and the "government" didn't do it, the Fed did which has absolutely no ability to help an individual with their mortgage -- no matter how far it stretches its mandate.

While I wouldn't agree with using the word bailout for the industry credit part I wouldn't strongly object to it either. And the actual government has been doing various things to try and bailout individual mortgages, most recently easing restrictions on mortgages purchasable or guaranteeable by various quasi-governmental agencies.

Is the Hillary Experience like the Lost Experience?

Only if she wins.

I've heard a couple of early reports on the radio that Hillary has scheduled a press conference for 5:00 p.m. EST to announce that she is pulling out of the race.

I guess she finally listened to all the people suggesting it over the weekend.

Seriously?!

I'm going to have to go mark my calendar. This may be a day of some significance concerning unlikely announcements.

You're right Alex, silly me, it is Kevy who said it. You got me Kevy!

I'm feeling blond I guess considering I was just in another thread discussing the "incident" of years past on this date. Stupid, stupid Jill, slaps forehead

Not only did Kevy say it, he said it today - April 1st.


:confused: Hmmm, since we normally advise not believing what Kevy says .... do we do the opposite on April 1st and trust him implicitely??

That sounds like a dangerous task should you wish to continue on that premise.

Kevy had me for a moment there. Very amusing!

My sources say the opposite:

Eh... Andy Borowitz is a hack

Love it!

Brilliant.

This popped up on my Madonna message board a while back:

Props to Clinton for a cute April Fools joke

I have to admit that was pretty funny.

So Hillary was saying that as a little girl she used to visit a cabin her grandfather built with his own 2 hands, near a lake in Pennsylvania, and there she learned to shoot a gun, blah blah blah...

It was one of those stories where I was waiting for her to go that her grandfather, carved the hills, dug the lake, and planted the trees too....lol

The page came up, but it was empty except for a link that takes you to the back to the same empty page. :confused:

The link worked for me, but try this direct YouTube link instead:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exsmFDYyK4U

Interesting comparisons. I remember watching her during the 1992 election and thinking she was kind of a weird looking middle aged lady. Now, I think she was kind of cute.

Hello? Hello? Hello?

Echo! Echo! Echo!


Man it's empty in here...

Talking about Hillary is a waste of time. However, I have heard a veru interesting theory about Hillary from her former long time and very politically astute advisor Dick Morris.

His theory is that Hillary knows she won't be the nominee. She isn't stupid. Once she drops out, though, she cant' try to do anything to harm Obama. Her goal is to do as much harm to Obama as possible prior to dropping out so that McCain wins the general and she can run again in 2012. In 2016 she will be 70, and while this may be sexist to say, there is very little chance a 70 year old woman gets elected.

Once she drops out, she will not do anything to help his campaign, and in fact, will be working behind the scenes against him indirectly, having political operatives do the dirty work.

No one knows Hillary better than Morris. An interesting theory indeed and somehting I would figure she would do. Neither Clinton lifted a finger to help John Kerrey in 2004 because they wanted him to lose so she could run in 2008.

Just a theory, but not a bad one.

Unfortunately most (but certainly not all) Hillary supporters fall under LTC(RET) Dave Grossman's definition of sheep and thus are unable to comprehend her wolf mentality.

Get out of my head!

I think non-support for Obama would be very conspicuous. For Kerry there was no good reason to support him, IMHO, since he was milquetoast. Obama CAN win and not supporting him would be pretty obvious. Hopefully, if that is her plan, it would backfire. The Clintons seem to be able to weather anything though...

Actually they can "not" support Obama and be inconspicuous......just have Bill campaign for the young man and, if recent history is anything to go by, he loses.

Every movement has its crazies. Here are Hillary's.

I found her enlightening, CP. Thanks for the link. As a person supposedly smack dab in the middle of Sen. Clinton's constituency, I've been having trouble understanding her appeal. It's beginning to dawn on me that a lot of women see a younger, "less qualified" man favored over an older, "more qualified" woman.

Someone needs to remind Hillary that winning the popular vote didn't work out so well for Gore.

Someone needs to remind Hillary that if she's going to claim she's winning the popular vote, she can't arbitrarily decide which ones to count and which to not.

She doesn't seem to have much respect for the intelligence of her constituency, does she?

That too.

Hello, Hello. She's long since stopped positioning herself for actually winning the nomination. She wants some influence is all. Bill is campaigning for her to be Obama's running mate, but she is merely looking to have some pull. She knows she's lost the nom, and she'll be dropping out soon after tomorrow's final primaries.


That said, her campaign is still gunning for the long-shot chance that her very valid argument will work ... namely that she wins far bigger than Obama in the states that matter for the electoral college win of the presidency. The superdelegates won't have the spine to do their job and pick the more strategic candidate. Instead they will rubber-stamp the choice of the voters. Nice ... but not their purpose.


Unbelievably, McCain is running very strongly against Obama. A very good argument can be made that Hillary is the stronger presidential candidate.


All a hill of beans. Soon after tomorrow, she will be out and Obama will be the Democratic Nominee. It should have been a cake walk from there to the presidency against the likes of John McCain. But that's not going to be the case.

John McCain was on The Daily Show a fewish weeks ago and seeing him speak is so odd. He looks re-animated. Since when did we start nominating presidential candidates that are made of spare parts from the dead?

Except that the only informal electoral poll that's been done so so far has Obama with 280 electoral votes and Clinton with 276 (both enough to beat McCain). So I don't really see what data supports that argument either. Not that I take a poll done in march with a sample size of 30,000 with a nomination race still going on as particularly meaningful, but it certainly makes Hillary's arguments that much less likely to hold water.

It's one thing for her to try to tell people they've made the wrong choice. It's another to utterly distort reality to do so. It takes a whole lot of caveating and squinting at fuzzy numbers to remotely support the claims she's made. I really don't see how playing the part of sore loser is helping her maintain influence. It's making her look like a bafoon.

That obviously goes back at least as far as Regan.

Then, there is the fact that she had agreed that Florida and Michigan delegates would not be seated way back when; but now that she's behind, she wants them counted. Hypocrisy, much?

But only counted in the way that's most advantageous to herself of course (not that the same isn't true for Obama).

I like her hypocricy. It's out in the open.




I'm going to revive this thread in three years when Obama's hidden hypocricy has been revealed in full. I'm not saying I don't like him. But if he's going to be president of the united states, he's going to be a hypocrite. I'd just rather it be out in the open before the election. I'd find that rather refreshing.

"Popular vote" in a process that is 30% caucuses in completely meaningless. Frequently no actual vote counts are reported, and when they are they are frequently just estimates.

And what to do in Texas where people were able to vote in both the straight vote and the caucus and overlap is not total but also not zero.

Yes, which is why Clinton's had to continually alter her story. First it was counting every state, including Michigan and Florida (only votes cast for Clinton in Michigan, ignoring the votes for "other" because Obama wasn't on the ballot). Then she started cherry-picking which caucus states to count. And now that the only deal offered was to count the "undecided" Michigan votes for Obama, she's thrown those out. And her latest version she's chosen to ignore the rest of the caucus states.

Did you know that if you only count the votes of people who support Hillary Clinton, Hillary Clinton has 100% of the popular vote!!

Drudge is hinting that Wednesday will mark the end of her campaign.

And if Drudge says it, well you know it's true....

I certainly hope so!

So a little early, but I'll forget to post this later.

I disagree. How on earth can we trust anyone who is so lousy at duplicity with state secrets? The better someone is at hiding something, the better prepared they are to run this country. We already know we can't trust Hillary- but we don't know about Obama. The longer he is able to hide the skeletons from everyone, the more I like him.;)


(Of course, there is that slight little chance that maybe, just maybe he is on the up and up..... I suppose you are arguing for voting in the devil you know, but in that case we may as well stick with the Repubs.)

Well, we may just get that chance. Despite the lousy campaign he is running, McCain is going to beat Obama unless things get horribly worse in this country.


I don't know which of those lousy options to hope for.

Huh?


ETA: Did a little more digging and found that a bit of the URL was lopped off. This is what she meant to post:

Thanks Kevy.

We have a temperamental firewall at work. I can view images on the original page, but when I post it, it doesn't display.

So the rumor floating around this morning is that Hillary will "concede that Obama has the needed number of delegates to secure the nomination" or something like that. Not a full pull-out from the race, but the beginning of a graceful exit.

More like the end of a not-so-graceful exit.

Thank God! Now I KNOW it's true she's leaving the race.

Of course they do: they don't want anything taking away from her moment in the spotlight.

Very true - I was just trying to be nice.

I just worry that she'll work behind the scenes to try and sabotage Obama in November so that she can say, "See... You should have made me the nominee!".

if thats the case, then it would surely reveal she is NOT the candidate one would want. sacrificing your own to shore up your own bruised ego does not speak well of a wannabe leader.

Only if it got out that that was what you were doing.

Dick Morris, former Clinton advisor, believes this is exactly what the Clintons are planning. He knows them pretty well.

Yes, but he's also a hack who just says whatever comes to mind that he thinks will get him some TV time.

You have to balance the two aspects of the man.

In this age of 24 hour media circuses, it's beyond me why anyone would think that they would be able to sneakily get away with sabotage behind the scenes, without being exposed.

Humm, as much as I hate Hillary I do think there is something to be said for having a president that's a sneaky bastard (or bitch). An important skill for international relations to be sure....

If she can scuttle Obama, not get caught, and earn the nomination in 2012 then I might just have to give her another look. Or move to Australia. Hard to say.

Joyce Lalonde
House Majority Whip James Clyburn
Congresswoman Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick
Rep. John Spratt of South Carolina
New York superdelegate Ralph Dawson
Tim Moore, a South Carolina Edwards delegate.

All superdelegates, all came out for Obama today.

Obama is convincing gay people to not keep their sexuality hidden? That's odd.

Hillary is better for the gays, I think.

HOWEVER.... I hope she does get the VP nod, as the Obama and Clinton camps are so divided right now, putting them together on the same ticket would ensure less votes go to McCrazy.

Now the question becomes, how many Hillary supporters think this way and are planning to vote for McCain in order to give her a shot at 2012.

Actually that would take away my Obama vote. As to whether I'd give it to McCain or the Libertarian candidate, I'm not sure, but I will not vote for a Clinton ticket of any variety.