Reply #5: I don't see Clinton as dishonest

[hfojvt]

She says "I helped to start" and that she "worked with Congress" and some have said that her lobbying WAS essential (or important) to it's passage. BILL Clinton, as President, did torpedo it, to support his balanced budget priority, and Hillary defended his decision to do so, but that was his choice and I don't expect her not to support her husband's administration.

Here's what I posted a while back:

Also, I was not especially aware of her involvement in it. So I did some googling and found this

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2007/10/06/c... /

Kudos to her then, except for a couple troubling details.

"The effort nearly went off the rails when Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, a Republican, said it violated the balanced budget agreement. President Clinton, eager to preserve the agreement, actually phoned lawmakers to kill the legislation when it came to the Senate floor.

Hillary Clinton defended her husband's action at the time. "He had to safeguard the overall budget proposal," she told one audience. But she insisted he would find other ways to provide health coverage for kids."

So Bill Clinton, anyway, put a balanced budget ahead of the needs of sick kids, and Hillary defended him.

Then I remembered something even more ironic. At the same time Bill Clinton was saying that we could not afford SCHIP at a cost of $24 billion over ten years, he was proposing a tax cut which favored the wealthy and would cost over $100 billion over ten years.

http://www.cbpp.org/clinttax.htm

"Analyses by the Treasury Department indicate that when fully in effect, the Clinton plan would give the 20 percent of Americans with the highest incomes about the same amount in tax cuts as the bottom 60 percent combined. This is an unusual characteristic for a tax plan proposed by a Democratic President."

So, according to Bill Clinton, we could not afford health care for children, but we could afford a much larger tax cut favoring the wealthy. Amazing what gets sacrificed when fiscal responsibility is made a priority.

Granted, this episode makes Bill look much worse than Hillary, but she also enabled and defended his bad decision. It's hardly an episode that proves that she puts the needs of ordinary people first and further illustrates that I do not want a President who has Bill Clinton as one of her closest advisors.