The Liberal Thread #2 - No Debate Please

[robinb]

Does anyone know what the mailings said? I tried to google them, but couldn't find anything. I will reserve judgment on them and her reaction until I know what they say.

 

[DISUNC]

Did you not watch Huckabee on SNL?

I also loved the pitch for Hillary!!

Dont forget the opening with the Press and love for Obama!

 

[DISUNC]

...oh yeah! Ralph Nader just threw his hat in the race!

 

[wvrevy]

[QUOTE="Got Disney";23401916]No he made a comment on how Hillary is OLD politics...he keeps talking about separating himself from OLD politics yet Kennedy is one of the oldest politicians of all. I don't mean OLD as in age I mean OLD as in style of politics.

Just making a point about how he wants to get away from those kind of people yet he is surrounding himself with all of them.

I have no problem with new politics. WE will not agree with this so we are better off stopping here. It will only cause us to get heated for what we disagree on, so I will say no more about it in this thread.

I am happy that you are so happy with your candidate of choice and that you believe so deeply about him. I do respect you for that. Please respect me for my feelings about him and my candidate.

My hard feelings are not with you. [/QUOTE]

1 - Even if you accept the argument that saying Hillary has been a supporter of NAFTA from the beginning is somehow negative - sounds more like indisputable FACT to me - Hillary has gone negative FAR more and in some pretty ridiculous ways.

2 - If you don't want to vote or don't mind throwing your vote away on that Nader idiot, then you might was well throw your vote McCain's way. Why not just go ahead and go all the way with throwing a fit that your candidate is losing?

3 - When Obama talks of "old" politics, he's talking about sucking up to and getting cozy with lobbyists as much as he is talking about the negativity some people bring to campaigning. How much money has Hillary accepted from lobbyists during this campaign?

4 - You can't "surround" yourself with one person. Yes, Ted Kennedy endorsed him. So...who else is there in the Democratic party that you object to? Or is it only anyone that has endorsed someone other than your preferred candidate?

The simple fact is that Obama is, in the end, going to get the vast majority of the people that were going out to vote for Hillary. If you choose to stay home or you choose to throw your vote away on Nader, then you are essentially choosing to be part of the problem, rather than part of the solution. If you'd prefer to see McCain as president, then that's fine. But if you're doing it out of petulance because your candidate didn't win...I don't even know what to say.

 

[LakeAriel]

...oh yeah! Ralph Nader just threw his hat in the race!

When did he align himself with the Republican party?

 

[DISUNC]

1 - Even if you accept the argument that saying Hillary has been a supporter of NAFTA from the beginning is somehow negative - sounds more like indisputable FACT to me - Hillary has gone negative FAR more and in some pretty ridiculous ways.

Heck in the 90's I even supported NAFTA! That was until the W admin got their hands on it!

 

[DISUNC]

When did he align himself with the Republican party?

2000
2004

 

[Peter Pirate 2]

On this I totally agree.

 

[wvrevy]

Heck in the 90's I even supported NAFTA! That was until the W admin got their hands on it!

Reasons aside, it doesn't change the fact that she supported it wholeheartedly until it became unpopular to do so (when she just happens to be running for national office). Nothing he put in that flyer was inaccurate.

On this I totally agree.

Based on....what, exactly? Oh, I'm not tryingt o say for a second that Barack is as pure as the driven snow. No politician is perfect, nor is any doctor, lawyer, or human being throughout the history of the world. But he has given NO indication through his words or actions that he is willing to sink down to the lowest level possible and wallow in the mud with the rest of them.

It's funny to me, reading the "Hillary supporters" thread right now. You'd think he'd called her every name in the book, right up to and including calling her a Bush cronie. The guy sent out to factual mailings about Hillary. Granted, I wish he had sent out two flyers about himself and his own beliefs and accomplishments, but it's hardly stunning that he is trying to cut into her lead in Ohio by talking about her as well. As long as the flyers were factual - and again, let me stress that they were - then I don't have a problem with it. Just as I wouldn't have a problem with her attacking him on one of his actual positions instead of the juvenile plagiarism crap, or the even more juvenile patriotism crap that the Republicans are throwing around.

 

[wvrevy]

From the Chicago Tribune:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/politics/chi-obama-speeches-analyzed-feb24,1,3150697.story

Barack Obama: Analyzing his stump speeches
Yes they are filled with platitudes, but they discuss policy as much as his opponents' speeches do
By Christi Parsons and John McCormick

Tribune correspondents

February 24, 2008

SAN ANTONIO -- As Barack Obama's town hall meeting stretched into its second hour, it was clear the candidate wasn't anywhere close to finishing.

Obama had given an eight-minute answer to a question on health care, after which a few dozen people began leaving the outdoor plaza.

"Just relax," Obama told the remaining audience members. "Take your time."

For a speaker who is best known for his lofty and airy rhetoric, it's an ironic reality that Obama's public appearances very often turn into drawn-out dissertations.

In fact, read side-by-side with the other candidates' current stump speeches, the Obama script makes at least as many references to policy proposals as do theirs.

Kindly put, though, those ideas aren't the crowd-pleasing part of his presentation. Also, they come from a candidate so new to the national scene--with just three full years under his belt in the Senate--that opponents question if he knows whereof he speaks.

And that may be what helps to fuel the criticism from detractors that Obama speaks mostly in "platitudes."

"Is it a fair criticism to say they have a lot of platitudes in them? It's accurate," said David Zarefsky, a Northwestern University professor who studies campaign rhetoric. "That's what stump speeches do. They're to capture an audience, to motivate people."

By reaching that height too well, he says, a stump speech can actually fail.

"There's a deep-seated cultural ambivalence we have about eloquence," Zarefsky said. "We seek it out, especially from leaders in times of crisis. On the other hand, we're suspicious that someone who is talking really well is putting something over on us."

Ambitious speakers in the past have found themselves vulnerable to the criticism. Robert F. Kennedy was questioned about who would actually pay for all of his noble plans. Gary Hart spoke grandly about "new ideas," only to be hit by a blunt rejoinder quoting a hamburger commercial: "Where's the beef?"

For his part, Obama has been criticized repeatedly as a speaker with more style than substance. Likely Republican nominee John McCain recently said that "to encourage a country with only rhetoric rather than sound and proven ideas ... is not a promise of hope. It is a platitude."

He also said that Obama's speeches lack specifics.

But lately, at least, Obama's stump speech has been heavy with them.

In San Antonio, where Obama delivered a typical version of his current stump speech, his address veered at one point into a two-minute description of his health-care plan. He mentioned the age cut-off for children on their parents' plans, the estimated cost reduction of premiums for those with private health insurance and a time frame for implementation.

He outlined the high points of his energy plan with numbers and industry jargon, calling for strict caps on greenhouse emissions, increases in car fuel-efficiency standards to 40 miles per gallon and creation of green-collar jobs, right down to those working on "cellulosic ethanol."

He ticked off the dollar figures he says working families and senior citizens could save with his economic plan, and promised to raise the minimum wage yearly to keep pace with inflation.

There are still mostly soft edges to Obama's stump speech, for instance his oblique promise within the economic plan to "strengthen Social Security and allow [seniors] to keep more money."

"We need service workers to get a decent wage and decent benefits," he said, without suggesting exactly how that might happen.

But compared with rival Democrat Hillary Clinton's current stump speech, that's not a stark contrast. Over the past few months, Clinton has begun to speak proportionally in more human terms about the hardships of working people.

She defines the campaign in terms of individuals, citing people with "mortgages they can't afford, medical bills that wiped out their life savings, tuition bills that cut short their children's dreams, who work the day shift and the night shift because they want the world for their children."

It's about scientists who want to do stem cell research, construction workers who want to rebuild the country and service members who wear the uniform of their country, she says.

"I see an America where college is affordable again for hard-working families and students," she says, and where "America is respected around the world again."

With President Bush out of office and John McCain defeated, she suggests, the country can work toward the America she envisions. She then alludes to her plans and policies--which she has previously presented in policy speeches and laid out in detail on her Web site--but doesn't generally go into the nuts and bolts.

These days, Clinton holds fewer of the lengthy question-and-answer sessions that once showcased her dexterity with public policy.

McCain now is in a different phase of his campaign from the Democrats. Since he began to lock down the Republican nomination and needed to travel to more states each day, he shifted to rallies with shortened versions of his speech--sometimes only 10 minutes in length.

One thing he has not abandoned as he moves from primary candidate to presumptive nominee is his availability to the media. Almost without fail, McCain takes questions from reporters at every campaign event--sometimes several times a day, and at length.

Interestingly, as the campaign continues, each candidate's rhetoric adapts to acknowledge that of the others--almost as if evolving into a three-way conversation.

Clinton says that "speeches don't put food on the table," and Obama echoes the idea in short order with his own spin.

Clinton tells voters, "Your voices are the change we seek," an idea similar to Obama's "We are the change that we seek."

And both Democrats have sounded the strains of former Democratic candidate John Edwards.

Like McCain, Clinton and Obama frame the other party's ideas in their own words and then criticize them. McCain criticizes Obama as lacking in specifics; Obama responds with detail.

But Zarefsky notes that what candidates say on the stump doesn't represent the full context of the campaign conversation.

When critics suggest that Obama's speeches "don't put food on the table," they are arguably alluding not just to his rhetoric but to his résumé.

Before he joined the U.S. Senate in 2005, Obama's time in public office consisted of eight years in the Illinois legislature.

"It's a reasonable inference," Zarefsky said. "This does connect up to the differing levels of experience of the candidates."

Clinton has found that talking directly about what she sees as Obama's lack of experience hasn't "gotten a lot of traction," said Zarefsky. "So this is a different twist to try to put on that same idea."

In other words, the criticism of Obama has inverted from the argument that he's "no action" to one that says he's "all talk."

Obama has clearly changed his stump speech to adjust to the new message, but says he disagrees with the premise.

"Let's be clear, speeches don't put food on the table," he said recently. "But the only way that we're going to bring about change is if all of you get excited about change."

But hey...don't let reality interfere with a good attack line.

 

[wvrevy]

John McCain "Friends" parody

http://therealmccain.com/

 

[JARNJ3]

Heck in the 90's I even supported NAFTA! That was until the W admin got their hands on it!

I supported it too - after the Al Gore\Ross Perot debate on Larry King.

It seems like Hillary didn't though........

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/02/14/did-hillary-clinton-reall_n_86674.html?view=print

Did Hillary Clinton Really Support NAFTA? Aides, Biographers Say No

February 14, 2008 01:13 PM

As the 2008 campaign shifts to economically hard-hit states like Ohio, so too do the topics of political debate. This week, Sen. Barack Obama's campaign has attacked Sen. Hillary Clinton on trade, arguing that she was once a supporter of the North American Free Trade Agreement that contributed to the loss hundreds of thousands of American jobs.

"A little more than a year ago," an Obama mailer reads, "Hillary Clinton thought NAFTA was a 'boon' to the economy." The piece goes on to argue that the New York Senator is "changing her tune" now that she's campaigning in the Buckeye State.

The attack is, most observers say, misleading. The "boon" line, a paraphrase lifted from a September 2006 Newsday article, has yet to be confirmed as an authentic quote. But, more importantly, the mailer misrepresents what former Clinton administration officials and biographers say was Hillary Clinton's long-held opposition to the legislation.

"In August in 92, we had to make a decision," Mickey Kantor the former U.S. Secretary of Commerce, Clinton adviser, and free trade advocate recalled for the Huffington Post. "President Clinton had to make a decision as governor, whether or not he would support [George H.W. Bush's] NAFTA, and of course he did... Hillary Clinton was one of the great skeptics in the discussion as to whether he should do. So she was always skeptical beginning in 1992 and onward."

Indeed, as Kantor went on to note, Hillary Clinton long held reservations over the labor and environmental fallouts of the free trade agreement. In addition, she was, at the time, eager to see her health care reform (not NAFTA) pushed through Congress. As such, Clinton biographer Sally Bedell Smith writes in her book "For Love of Politics," her disapproval of the trade agreement was both political and philosophical.

The economic team and other key advisors, including Mack McLarty, Mickey Kantor, and David Gergen, were likewise urging Bill to use his momentum to push or congressional ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)...Liberal Democrats, including Hillary, opposed it primarily because it could take jobs away from American workers. But as an advocate of global economic cooperation, Bill was drawn to its free-trade philosophy.

It fell to Mickey Kantor, the U.S. Trade Representative responsible for implementing NAFTA, to reason with Hillary. One day in August, he sat her down on a bench behind the White House and tried to strike a compromise. "I said, 'If you want to drop NAFTA, we can kill it, but we shouldn't,'" Kantor recalled. "I said, 'The way to do it is to introduce health care, spend a month on it, and then do NAFTA, then go back to health care.'" With misgivings, Hillary acquiesced to the proposed sequence.

Carl Bernstein, another Clinton biographer, echoed much the same tale during a recent appearance on CNN.

"'Bill,'" he recalled Hillary Clinton as saying, "'you are doing Republican economics when you are doing NAFTA.' She was against NAFTA. And if she would somehow come out and tell the real story of what she fought for in the White House and failed in a big argument with her husband she would end up moving much closer to those [John] Edwards followers."

So why didn't we hear such protests from Hillary Clinton during her husband's administration?

"The whole time that she was first lady," said Robert Shapiro, the undersecretary of commerce during the Clinton White House years, "she, like everybody else...[was] not supposed to deviate from the position of the administration. There is no freedom of speech in there, and that certainly applies to a first lady."

On the 2008 campaign trail, Clinton has been free of those shackles. And, on many occasions, she has expressed misgivings about NAFTA, although usually she qualifies her statements by saying she supports the underlying idea.

"I believe in the general principles it represented," she said last February, noting that she voted against CAFTA [the Central American Free Trade Agreement] because of a lack of environmental and labor standards. "But what we have learned is that we have to drive a tougher bargain. Our market is the market that everybody wants to be in. We should quit giving it away so willy-nilly. I believe we need tougher enforcement of the trade agreements we already have."

Clinton ``is committed to free trade and to the growing role of the international economy,'' Steven Rattner, a Clinton fundraiser and co-founder of Quadrangle Group LLC, a New York buyout firm told Bloomberg.com. ``She would absolutely do the right thing as president.''

More recently, at the Las Vegas Democratic Debate on November 15, 2007, she offered the following, more concise declaration: "NAFTA was a mistake to the extent that it did not deliver on what we had hoped it would."

 

[wvrevy]

I supported it too - after the Al Gore\Ross Perot debate on Larry King.

It seems like Hillary didn't though........

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/02/14/did-hillary-clinton-reall_n_86674.html?view=print

Ummm...from the same site:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-sirota/hillary-clinton-pretends-_b_86747.html

Hillary Clinton PRETENDS She Never Praised NAFTA

In response to Barack Obama's attack on NAFTA, the Hillary Clinton campaign has gone into meltdown mode. Here's Dow Jones' Marketwatch:

"Clinton's campaign fired back at Obama, charging the Illinois senator with misrepresenting Clinton's position on trade...'Recently [Obama] falsely claimed that Hillary said that NAFTA was a 'boon' to the economy. Now, Obama is resting his argument on a single paraphrase from an article written twelve years ago,' Clinton's campaign said in an emailed statement."

The Huffington Post has followed along with a laugh-out-loud piece in which the chief architects of NAFTA (many who are now wealthy corporate lawyers and lobbyists) are now saying, no, no, Hillary Clinton was really opposed to it. These are the same people, of course, who are looking for jobs in the Hillary Clinton White House.

What a total joke, really. This campaign clearly thinks we are all just a bunch of fools.

Hillary Clinton has made statements unequivocally trumpeting NAFTA as the greatest thing since sliced bread. The Buffalo News reports that back in 1998, Clinton attended the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and thanked praised corporations for mounting "a very effective business effort in the U.S. on behalf of NAFTA." Yes, you read that right: She traveled to Davos to thank corporate interests for their campaign ramming NAFTA through Congress.

On November 1, 1996, United Press International reported that on a trip to Brownsville, Texas, Clinton "touted the president's support for the North American Free Trade Agreement, saying it would reap widespread benefits in the region."

The Associated Press followed up the next day noting that Hillary Clinton touted the fact that "the president would continue to support economic growth in South Texas through initiatives such as the North American Free Trade Agreement."

In her memoir, Clinton wrote, "Senator Dole was genuinely interested in health care reform but wanted to run for president in 1996. He couldn't hand incumbent Bill Clinton any more legislative victories, particularly after Bill's successes on the budget, the Brady bill and NAFTA."

Yes, we are all expected to just forget that, so that Hillary Clinton's campaign can manufacture supposed "outrage" that anyone would say she supported NAFTA - all at a time her chief strategist, Mark Penn, simultaneously heads a firm that is right now pushing to expand NAFTA into South America.

What a total insult to America's intelligence.

 

[JARNJ3]

Ummm...from the same site:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-sirota/hillary-clinton-pretends-_b_86747.html

If you read the prior post - those statements were made when she was on "Team Bill."

There are actual quotes there from contemporaries - whatever.

I vowed not to debate any more. And I won't.

Just wanted to point out - she was supporting the current administration at the time......... which was her "job" as First Lady.

So why didn't we hear such protests from Hillary Clinton during her husband's administration?

"The whole time that she was first lady," said Robert Shapiro, the undersecretary of commerce during the Clinton White House years, "she, like everybody else...[was] not supposed to deviate from the position of the administration. There is no freedom of speech in there, and that certainly applies to a first lady."

 

[LakeAriel]

2000
2004

Short, sweet and accurate..

 

[MerryPoppins]

Does anyone know what the mailings said? I tried to google them, but couldn't find anything. I will reserve judgment on them and her reaction until I know what they say.

Here is one.

http://www.ohiodailyblog.com/content/obama-mailer-slams-clinton-nafta

 

[KyDerbyMan]

Here is one.

http://www.ohiodailyblog.com/content/obama-mailer-slams-clinton-nafta

One of the worst pieces of legislation ever. Ross Perot's famous words came true with the signing of that. But, what to expect from the Clintons? They are DLC. The pro-Corporate wing of the Democratic Party.

 

[Planogirl]

Yep, she is, you know!!!
It's just sickening. The Obama camp and supporters would be shouting as loud as they can if Hillary did something like this.

Obama has gone way down with my support

Just goes to show that Obama really truly is just a politican like every one else --- No Change!

I feel that way too. He just cloaks it in pretty words. Not that that means he isn't a good candidate but wow, he might actually be human.

 

[Oreo Cookie]

Rove's involvement in questionable and illegal activity doesn't suprise me anymore.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/02/21/60minutes/main3859830.shtml

 

["Got Disney"]