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In reply to the discussion: Hillary Clinton on Iraq vote: ‘I still got it wrong. Plain and simple.’ [View all]karynnj
(59,503 posts)Hillary's goals on healthcare in 1993 were good, but neither she nor Bill Clinton had much experience with the US Congress. In the case of healthcare, this became a problem when she and Ira Magaziner, a brilliant Rhodes Scholar and former antiwar activist who had been a business consultant, but also had little real personal experience with Congress. The funny thing is, if it were now 1993 and DU exists as it does now - the team of Hillary Clinton and Magaziner would be favored by DU over the various committees in the Senate and the House.
I suspect that had Bill Clinton waited 2 years, they might have been more successful. However, it is more likely that 1994 would still have had the loses in Congress as they were likely more related to the budget than to the failed healthcare plan. Then people would have contrasted Bill Clinton with Obama who started healthcare as soon as he was in and when he had both Houses of Congress.
Not to mention, a case can be made that they learned from that experience. In 1996, Kerry and Kennedy wrote a bill (based on a MA program that already existed) that paid a tapered amount of the cost for children's health insurance for families with incomes above Medicaid level and below a threshold (where it tapered to zero). It was paid for by a new tax on tobacco. The next year, Kennedy worked with Hatch, changing the plan from a national one to one where each state created its own version. Hillary Clinton was one of the people who lobbied Congress to pass it -- and lobbied her husband to include it in his proposed budget. This is SCHIP, the biggest increase in public insurance since Medicare. This is clearly not a failure. (I know I am on record with having said she claimed too much credit for this in 2008 - something I still think true. She was important as an advocate, but the design of the bill and the impetuous to create it are better credited to Kennedy - and secondarily to Kerry and Hatch. However, it is normal for a President to take credit for anything he signed into law. -- thus W does get credit for the AIDS in Africa part of Pepfar - which was written by Kerry and sponsored originally by Kerry and Frist. )
As to foreign policy, I don't think it fair to say that Obama's foreign policy was a failure in the first term. It is clear that a lot of remedial work was needed to reestablish relations that had soured in the 8 years of Bush. It is also clear that the way Obama defined the job, Clinton did a lot of work improving how the State Department runs and visiting a huge number of countries including many that were not major countries to improve relationships. She articulated that the world needed to allow women rights.
Hillary had a good analogy that the job of Secretary of State often is one of passing the baton. There is no question that there is a far better chance that a collision with Iran will be avoided than it seemed in 2009. While Obama and Kerry - not to mention Roulani and his FM do as well, deserve a lot of credit for the fact we are negotiating and much more if a final agreement is reached, some of this was set into motion when Clinton was SoS. (Here, Clinton is doing what is the most reasonable political thing to do - she is setting herself up to get major credit if Obama/Kerry pull it off and distancing herself enough in case it fails. Either way she wins - as the person who set the tough sanctions and started the process.)
As to some of the "failures" - the middle east was a powder keg for decades and a fuse was lit with the 2 wars that Bush started. On many things that went wrong, we can't see what the other alternative would have been. (For instance, Clinton likely would have backed Mubarak when Obama dropped support. However, there were millions of people in the street and squares and those people included a huge portion of the elite, educated youth. Had there been a President Hillary Clinton and had she backed Mubarak, the likelihood is that he still would have fallen out of power. It is not clear anything would have been different now -- except the US would have been seen more clearly as for the authoritarian tyrant.)
As to Russia, Putin and Lavrov have had a terrible relationship with every President/ Secretary of State from Colin Powell, to Condi Rice (Russian scholar that she was), to Hillary Clinton. The problem is not just the US -- Putin, ex KGB nationalist is very much a problem. The fact that Lavrov has a decent working relationship with Kerry - that helped on the Syrian chemical weapons and Iran - was not sufficient to avoid the problems in Ukraine where the Russian interests were involved. (It did lead to the Lavrov/Kerry link being the sole Russia/US communication link briefly.) Here, the problem was not ALL the former Secretaries of State. I think Kerry is exceptional, but the fact is that of all of them he is the only white male. In addition, most accounts speak of Lavrov sharing his interests in hockey and soccer - which is rings more truthful than comments that he appreciates Kerry's "professionalism" - with an obvious negative inference to the others - likely rooted in racism or sexism.