Former Clinton administration Labor Secretary Robert Reich defends Barack Obama against Bill Clinton’s charge that he lacks experience: “When he ran in 1992, Bill Clinton had been the governor of a small, rural southern state; as such, he had only limited experience with national issues and no foreign policy experience to speak of. Incidentally, at this point in the 2008 presidential election, Hillary Clinton has served as an elected official in the U.S. Senate for not quite eight years, and before that a first lady in the White House. Obama has so far held elective office for almost 12 years, at both levels of government — first as an Illinois state senator and then as a U.S. senator. Before that he was a community organizer among Chicago’s poor, and then a civil rights lawyer — two experiences that in my view are critically relevant to anyone seeking to become president of all Americans.”
Posted by Randy Scholfield
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7 Comments
So WE Editors,
When do we get a thread in favor of a Republican candidate?
When you get a republican candidate worthy to post about?
Ron Paul, there is a Republican candidate worth a thread!
Nathan, why would anybody want a thread in favor of a Republican candidate? I think we all agree they pretty much suck.Except for Fred. He’s a moron.
Nathan – did you miss the thread about Fred Thompson? Last time I checked, he was a Hollywood Republican.
Brownback has a thread only a couple days old. As for Baracks exp agree with Reich. Hillary has a couple for years Senate exp big deal. The only candidate’s with exp Richardson who’s had jobs at every government lv or Ron Paul who’s at least had a private sector job that’s not a lawyer in addition to his congressional service.
Abraham Lincoln had what? One term in Congress?
He won the presidency only because there were four parties’ candidates in the 1860 race.
He handled the greatest crisis ever to have faced this nation with elegance, courage, dignity, and intelligence.
I frequently return to observations that the President of the United States, for all his power, serves primarily as a reflection of the mindset of Americans. What George HW Bush called “the vision thing.”
Coolidge took office with “The business of America is Business,” and the Roaring 20s were on! Hoover was a traditional “Stay the Course” Republican who couldn’t quite see the disaster of capitalism gone wild. Roosevelet inspired a nation by rallying all the strengths of working together… to return to prosperity, to fight tyranny, to be more together than we could every be as individuals.
Harry Truman won in 1948 because he embodied the Ordinary Man who’d won World War II. But Americans at the time wanted someone *extraordinary* as President. They chose Eisenhower whose true genius during the war was as a manager of logistics. After years of objecting to — and being proven wrong about — FDR’s New Deal and an internationalist foreign policy, the voters of 1952 wanted someone who would “stay the course.”
The most important phrase of JFK’s inaugural address wasn’t “Ask not…,” but “The torch has been passed…” Although Kennedy was diffident about the Civil Rights Movement early on (it was politically dicey), he reflected a nation that was ripe for equal protection under the law, for extending a basic safety net for the oldest, the weakest, and the poorest of Americans. We were just too damned good as a people not to share the wealth born of our superior system of government: the Constitution of the United States of America.
LBJ was an FDR-wannabe. It was virtually impossible for him to be an extention of JFK idealism, but Lyndon was a crafty politician. As long as he threw bones to the conservatives and assured them he was fighting communism, he got the Civil Rights bill.
Two bullets into the heads of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy changed everything.
Nixon won in 1968 by lying about his “secret plan to end the Vietnam War.” Once he got the power he craved, he played to the “America has never lost a war” pseudo-patriots even as he threw bones to the liberals by creating the Environmental Protection Agency, repealed the gold standard (assuring inflation in the late-1970s…. for which Carter would be blamed), and sent more than half of the Americans who died in Vietnam to their graves.
Gerry Ford was a watershed event for Republic Party operatives. They discovered even a dolt in the Oval Office could command a modium of respect.
Jimmy Carter was the American people hoping against hope that a decent outsider might possibly represent the vast majority of decent outsiders across the nation. He inherited a corrupt government and the disasterous economic policies set up by Nixon and ultimately was brought down by an unprecedented attack on an embassy. The Iranians in 1978 didn’t play by the rules of international diplomacy.
Where’d they get *that* idea?! Well, maybe when Nixon started to bomb Cambodia…
But then we got Reagan. Oh, golly, what a feel-good president! He said all the right things, he believed all the right things the country-club Rebublicans professed… and he spent us into the biggest deficit in history. He paid off his cronies in the military-industrial complex so lavishly that even the “Evil Empire” concluded the irrationality of the Cold War had to stop.
George Herbert Walker Bush came face to face with the fundamental flaw of Reaganomics and committed the apostacy of raising taxes. Bill Clinton took the torche away and ran the government on a budget but offended all the non-baby-boomers by committing the “high crime and/or misdemeanor” of getting an extra-marital blow job.
So look at what we have now. A rich Momma’s boy whose had his fat pulled out of the fire all his life by Daddy’s money, Daddy’s friends, and an unfounded belief that nothing bad that’s happened to him ever happened and everything good that’s happened to him is God’s will.
So what do we face in 2008?
We may have to face a “Grow up, America,” it’s time to pay the bills and come to grips with the fact that all our problems can’t be solved by killing brown people.
We may elect a “Let’s Get Adult Supervision in Washington” president who will lead a reapprochement into an international community of government, resources, economies, and ideologies that are…in the grand scheme of things… more or less equal in power and purpose.
If we were to get a Brownback electede, it’s time for all of us to go up to the hills and wait for Jesus to return.
I read a lot of blogs and talk to dozens of people. I hear no one of any crediblity on any issue eager to stay the course of the George WMD Bush administration.
Perhaps those who feel they are enlightened can come up with a case of four more years of the last six-and-a-half.