Reply #17: A relevant article

[Armstead]

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/01/23/6590/


A Clinton Twofer’s High Price
by Rosa Brooks

...The problem for Hillary Clinton is that, as usual, she wants it both ways. She wants to be judged on her own merits and not be treated as Bill’s Mini-Me. But she also wants to reap the benefits of Bill’s popularity, and offers voters the reassuring suggestion that if there’s a crisis while she’s in the White House, there will be someone around who really does have executive branch experience — namely, Bill — to lend a hand.

But the Clintons are playing a dangerous game. The more they remind us of what we liked about Act I of the Bill and Hillary Show, the more they also remind us of what we hated.

It’s true that the Bush administration is enough to make anyone nostalgic for the Clinton era. Compared with the catastrophes that President Bush unleashed, Bill Clinton’s misdeeds seem like minor peccadilloes. Under Clinton, the United States didn’t fall into a potentially devastating economic crisis, didn’t rack up record-breaking debts and budget deficits, didn’t adopt a policy of torturing people, didn’t seek to gut international human rights standards, didn’t get bogged down in any major, pointless and unwinnable wars and didn’t actively alienate huge swathes of the global population.

On the other hand — and where the Clintons are concerned, it’s always wise to wonder what the hand you can’t see is up to — once you stop comparing the Clinton presidency with the Bush presidency, it no longer looks so great. On the whole, the Clinton era was a time of culture war and scandal, “triangulation” and botched reforms (healthcare anyone?), vacillation and paralysis......

...Obama offers something transformative and new, and this frightens some voters, who wonder if he can live up to his undeniable potential. The Clintons, meanwhile, offer something old and familiar. But will a trip down memory lane with Billary reassure voters or end up frightening them even more?