HIllary Clinton is a coward.

[backscatter712]

I think it's time to ask ourselves a question. What is the most important character trait of a President? Is it correct positions on the issues? Is it the ability to make brilliant speeches? Inspire crowds? Is it sharp elbows and the ability to twist arms in the Beltway? Is it empathy and ability to identify with ordinary Americans? Who knows?

But I'll tell you this. All of those traits mean nothing without one other trait: courage.

None other than Barack Obama wrote about this topic in The Audacity of Hope. He writes

Neither ambition nor single-mindedness fully accounts for the behavior of politicians, however. There is a companion emotion, perhaps more pervasive and certainly more destructive, an emotion that, after the giddiness of your official announcement as a candidate, rapidly locks you in its grip and doesn't release you until after Election Day. That emotion is fear. Not just fear of losing — although that is bad enough — but fear of total, complete humiliation.

That's the biggest motivator - fear of humiliation. Losing face. Losing status, losing an election, being the target of scorn and mockery. Being not just humiliated, but being humiliated in spotlights in front of cameras, in the eyes of millions of people. Not ambition, not even money beats fear as the prime motivator in the beltway.

Inevitably, when someone proposes a major bill, such as one that would end the Iraq War, or reform health care, the political sharks in the Beltway smell blood and a feeding frenzy begins. The lobbyists start plying their trade, various powerful people start twisting arms, and in the end is the very danger of complete humiliation. The fear takes hold, and only a person with enough courage can come through to the other side and do what it takes to do the right thing.

Obama understands this. He has the courage to work through his fear. He's pushed through that fear in 2002, when he came out publicly against the Iraq War, when just about everyone else either supported the war or remained silent.

Hillary Clinton does not adequately push through her fear. It shows in her voting record - when she voted for the Iraq War Resolution, when she voted for Kyl-Lieberman, when she voted against banning cluster munitions. All those votes were designed to do one thing - save her from humiliation. Save her from being publicly excoriated by the GOP and the media for being "soft" on defense and foreign policy.

And the consequences of such votes are dire. This isn't a high school popularity contest. This is national decision making. And when people choose to save face instead of doing the right thing, people suffer. Over a million people died in the Iraq War so far, and countless children are being maimed and killed by cluster bomblets that look like toys and are continuing to be used today.

Barack Obama has shown the courage to risk embarrassment and political defeat in order to do the right thing. Clinton has not.

Let me put it more bluntly. Hillary Clinton is a coward. She does not have what it takes to truly lead this nation in a new direction. If she is President, I'm afraid that she'll maintain the current destructive status quo. When arms start getting twisted in the Beltway, she'll buckle. Just like Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Steny Hoyer and Ken Salazar, among others, who also choose to avoid humiliation by failing to do the right thing.

We need a candidate with a great deal of courage to stand as our President - this country is in a very dark time right now, the job will be very difficult, and the pressure will be high to do the expedient thing instead of the right thing. If our President buckles, we'll all face the consequences.

[papau]

1. and the plan is HOPE? - Hill fought the insurance co's and lost - what has O fought win or lose?

[greyghost]

2. Great question! Chirp, Chirp, Chirp....

[jakem]

46. he has fought and won a majority of primaries!

counts for something (oh, unless all those states don't count...)

[MonkeyFunk]

52. Actually

in the abstract, the number of states won doesn't count.

[jakem]

55. are we voting abstractly now?

[MonkeyFunk]

56. Nope

I'm just saying "he won a majority of states" is a meaningless factoid.

[jakem]

57. ok, then lets drop her 'winning states that count' shall we

i have an idea... lets count the freaking delegates!

[blm]

9. Clintons protect Bushes BECAUSE they fear backlash of going against those who groomed them

and bankrolled them to power.

[backscatter712]

12. Oh, let's see a few examples.

There's the Lugar-Obama nonproliferation law.

There's his work in Illinois on the death penalty, child care, etc. Specifically, he worked through a bill requiring interrogations and confessions to be videotaped, as there was a problem with police beating confessions out of people.

He's worked on everything from improving schools to lobbying reform.

But oh yeah, the Illinois State Senate is just mickey-mouse stuff - if it isn't proclaimed by the Clinton News Network, it doesn't count...

[DemGa]

23. Don't forget "community organizer" ---NT

[backscatter712]

24. Thanks, That too. nt

[papau]

29. Lugar-Obama nonproliferation law asked for a 20 page report to be produced - which wasn't done

[papau]

30. what corporation was against "confessions to be videotaped"

[backscatter712]

33. The Chicago PD, for one...

Not a corporation, but an organization with a less than stellar reputation, and a lot of strings to pull...

[papau]

63. corporate power is the problem - as can be seen by the fact that taping passed but

Obama likes the soft coal miners solution to the energy problem.

[papau]

31. Can we say Obama has never fought a Corporation backed bill?

[stillcool]

49. If you really wanted to know...

you would read. The internet is really great for things like that. For instance:

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1704117,00.html

Obama's accomplishments are more substantial and varied than Clinton suggests. And he has a longer record in elected office than she does, as a second-term New York senator.

Obama was a community organizer and led a voter-registration effort in Chicago that added tens of thousands of people to the rolls. He was a civil rights attorney and taught at one of the nation's premier universities. He helped pass complicated measures in the Illinois legislature on the death penalty, racial profiling, health care and more. In Washington, he has worked with Republicans on nuclear proliferation, government waste and global warming, amassing a record that speaks to a fast start while lacking the heft of years of service.
--------------------------------------------------------------
After college, Obama moved to Chicago for a low-paying job as a community organizer. He worked with poor families on the South Side to get improvements in public housing, particularly the removal of asbestos.

"Nobody else running for president has jumped off the career track for three or four years to help people," said Jerry Kellman, who first hired Obama as a community organizer.

Obama also fought for student summer jobs and a program to keep at-risk children from dropping out of school. More importantly, say those who worked with Obama, he showed people how to organize and confront powerful interests.

"He had to train residents to stand up for their own rights," said former organizer Loretta Augustine-Herron, who was part of Obama's Developing Communities Project.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Obama then spent several years focusing on the law, both as an attorney at a small firm specializing in civil rights and as a lecturer on constitutional law at the University of Chicago.

As an attorney, he was on the team that successfully sued the state of Illinois for failing to implement a federal voter-registration law. Obama also worked on case of a whistle-blower who lost her job after exposing waste and corruption in a medical research project. The whistle-blower ended up with a $5 million settlement.

Obama was elected to the Illinois state Senate in 1996, when Democrats were in the minority. He proposed hundreds of new laws, including universal health care, tougher gun control and expanded welfare, but saw most of them spiked by Republican leadership.

He did have some successes, though — particularly in passing legislation sharply restricting the gifts that Illinois politicians could accept from lobbyists. Illinois has notoriously weak government ethics laws, and the Gift Ban Act was the first major new restriction since the Watergate era.

Obama also helped set up Illinois' "KidCare" program that provided health care to children in families that did not qualify for Medicaid.

John Bouman, president of the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law, said Obama's work helped make the program more consumer-friendly. He also said Obama was often willing to give up credit for the legislation if that helped win Republican support.

"It tells you something that as a relatively junior member in the minority party, he was an important negotiator," Bouman said.
---------------
He teamed with Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., to study the dangers of nuclear proliferation and pass legislation meant to keep nuclear material from falling into the hands of terrorists.

Obama also joined with Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., after Hurricane Katrina to improve oversight of federal spending.

And he shared billing with a Republican presidential hopeful when he joined Arizona Sen. John McCain in sponsoring legislation that called for sharp, mandatory cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. The effort failed.

[papau]

64. Sorry - but the name of the corporation or corporate lobby is missing in your post

[stillcool]

50. January 1993

http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/January-1993/Vote-of-Confidence/
Vote of Confidence
A huge black turnout in November 1992 altered Chicago's electoral landscape—and raised a new political star: a 31-year-old lawyer named Barack Obama.
By Gretchen Reynolds

In the final, climactic buildup to November's general election, with George Bush gaining ground on Bill Clinton in Illinois and the once-unstoppable campaign of senatorial candidate Carol Moseley Braun embroiled in allegations about her mother's Medicare liability, one of the most important local stories managed to go virtually unreported: The number of new voter registrations before the election hit an all-time high. And the majority of those new voters were black. More than 150,000 new African-American voters were added to the city's rolls. In fact, for the first time in Chicago's history-including the heyday of Harold Washington-voter registrations in the 19 predominantly black wards outnumbered those in the city's 19 predominantly white ethnic wards, 676,000 to 526,000.

The election, to some degree, turned on these totals: Braun and Clinton had almost unanimous support among blacks. But just as important, if less obvious, are the implications black votership could have for future city and state elections: For the first time in ten years, more than half a million blacks went to the polls in Chicago. And with gubernatorial and mayoral elections coming up in the next two years, it served notice to every¬one from Jim Edgar to Richard M. Daley that an African-American voting bloc would be a force to be reckoned with in those races.

None of this, of course, was accidental. The most effective minority voter registration drive in memory was the result of careful handiwork by Project Vote!, the local chapter of a not-for-profit national organization. "It was the most efficient campaign I have seen in my 20 years in politics," says Sam Burrell, alderman of the West Side's 29th Ward and a veteran of many registration drives.

At the head of this effort was a little-known 31-year-old African-American lawyer, community organizer, and writer: Barack Obama. The son of a black Kenyan political activist and a white American anthropologist, Obama was born in Hawaii, received a degree in political science and English literature from Columbia University, and, in 1990, became the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review. In 1984, after Columbia but before Harvard, Obama moved to Chicago. "I came because of Harold Washington," he says. "I wanted to do community organizing, and I couldn't think of a better city than one as energized and hopeful as Chicago was then." He went to work for a South Side church-affiliated development group and "was heartened by the enthusiasm." But barely three years later, Washington died, and Obama, convinced he needed additional skills, enrolled at Harvard Law School. The African-American community he left, rent by political divisions and without a clear leader, went into a steep decline. By 1991, when Obama, law degree in hand, returned to Chicago to work on a book about race relations-having turned his back on the Supreme Court clerkship that is almost a given for the law review's top editor-black voter registration and turnout in the city were at their lowest points since record keeping began.

Six months after he took the helm of Chicago's Project Vote!, those conditions had been reversed.

[papau]

66. Sorry - but the name of the corporation or corporate lobby is missing in your post

[Voice for Peace]

51. Here's one he fought and won: a fight against police abuse

Pushed Illinois bill to videotape all capital interrogations

Obama had a 2002 bill to stop police abuse. Chicago had become infamous for use of torture by police to help frame innocent people. Thirteen innocent men on Death Row were exonerated and released, some of them victims of these tortured confessions. Illinois desperately needed some action to restore confidence in the police. Obama's proposal was to require videotaping of interrogations of suspects in capital cases. When Obama began, the idea of a bill was opposed by police, prosecutors, most of the senate and the governor. The governor was determined not to appear soft on crime, and had promised to veto any proposal for mandatory tapings.

By the time Obama finished his work, the police and prosecutors embraced the bill, it passed in the Illinois Senate by a vote of 58-0. The governor took the unusual step of reversing himself to sign it, and Illinois became the first state to require such tapings.

http://www.ontheissues.org/2008/Barack_Obama_Crime.htm

[papau]

67. Sorry - but the name of the corporation or corporate lobby is missing in your post

[DURHAM D]

3. Do you know who ghost wrote his book? eom

[MonkeyFunk]

4. bullshit

she's braver than 90% of politicians.

If ANYBODY in American life could've been excused for wanting to retire from the public eye, it would've been Clinton in 2000. Instead, she said "Fuck you guys, I'm still in the game" and ran for and won a Senate seat in an expensive, difficult state.

Your title is pure flamebait.

[Lucinda]

7. Exactly.

[rodeodance]

5. Divisive post. SHAME ON YOU.

[UALRBSofL]

This post is very divisive

This is the theme of Obama's campaign as well and his supporters on DU reflect this in there posts.

[rodeodance]

16. I have

notified the mods and hope others do also.

[Genevieve]

68. You notified the mods because HC is being called a coward?

nt

[BumRushDaShow]

8. Can you refute why her tactics aren't cowardly?

:shrug:

[rodeodance]

14. I will not contribute to this post.

[hisownpetard]

40. You already did.

[mtnsnake]

38. That's the job of the moles....to divide

They have no interest in supporting Obama, they just come here to spread divisiveness as best they can by spreading shit as if it was butter about the Clintons.

[Little Star]

6. hahahahahahahahah

[John Q. Citizen]

10. Great post. Hill is a coward. From her secret meetings with the insurance companies to her

vote on the IWR, she has shown that fear is what motivates her.

K&R!

[DemGa]

11. You are making Obama angry with your failure to commit to "hope and change."

[NashVegas]

13. You Misspelled "HERO"

For having the 'nads to take her argument directly to the American people, instead of laying down when the MSM tries to bury her.

[grantcart]

15. Its not a question of courage it's all calculation. Every position is the

result of trying to calculate the political implications down the road. To be tested on courage you have to have some overwhelming fundamental compelling ethical imperative in which you are willing to stand up for. The Clinton's simply do not have that.

[OzarkDem]

17. More sexism and Dem hating

take it to another forum.

[backscatter712]

19. Quit crying wolf.

If you're going to sex-bait, try naming an exact quote from what I've written that is sexist.

[Chasing Dreams]

18. I disagree. Hillary is an Imperialist.

You say:

"Hillary Clinton does not adequately push through her fear. It shows in her voting record - when she voted for the Iraq War Resolution, when she voted for Kyl-Lieberman, when she voted against banning cluster munitions. All those votes were designed to do one thing - save her from humiliation. Save her from being publicly excoriated by the GOP and the media for being "soft" on defense and foreign policy."

I think she is a true believer, a long-time supporter of the MIC. Check out some of the links in my post from last night: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x4982050

[backscatter712]

22. Different sides of the same coin.

You make good points.

What we're talking about is acquisition of power. Of course, flip the coin, and what you get is fear of the loss of power. Which is joined at the hip with losing face, losing status.

[Chasing Dreams]

27. Well, now we agree.

Hillary is an Imperialist, a shill for the MIC, MSM, and Big Oil. They are afraid of losing power as you suggest. And through Hillary, their cowardice and shame is appalling. Unfortunately, these people will do everything they can to maintain power. And you know what I'm talking about.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

20. Well, she boldly stood up and backed Bush's war.

That, some here consider heroic....or, at least worthy of spinning and defending.

[UALRBSofL]

37. John Kerry voted IWR

And you voted for him in the GE. What I call hypocrisy.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

39. You're right. Never to be repeated.

The final nose-holding for the lesser of two evils.

[grasswire]

21. I doubt that most women think Hillary lacks courage.

She is a model of tenacity and strength under fire.

What was it that allowed her to go about her tasks every day of the decade when she and her husband were under unrelenting assault in the most gross and humiliating ways?

What was it that allowed her to run for the Senate instead of withdrawing from public life?

What was it that has driven her campaign to persevere despite the misogyny still directed at her?

It's raw courage.

I admire that, and I'm not even a Hillary supporter.

Calling her a coward is just stupid.

[QC]

25. Dontcha just love the new politics of hope and change?

Of course, it looks and sounds an awful lot like the old politics of Freak Republic, but that's purely coincidental, I'm sure.

[RememberWellstone]

26. Obama is a female

impersonator..he looks like a man but acts like a woman. Hillary has more balls than the Male/she Oompa.

[backscatter712]

32. I thought it was the Obama crowd that resorted to shameless misogyny.

"Acts like a woman?"

You say that like it's a bad thing.

Why your statements could be considered SEXIST!!!

:popcorn:

[foo_bar]

34. what do you have against Oompa Loompas?

The original book first portrayed Oompa-Loompas as black pygmies from "the very deepest and darkest part of the African jungle where no white man had been before". After the book's U.S. release, complaints of racism caused Dahl to rewrite the characters as dwarves with "golden-brown hair" and "rosy-white" skin.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oompa_Loompa

Good to know. Hornswoggler.

Down goes Veruca! Down the drain!
And here, perhaps, we should explain
That she will meet, as she descends,
A rather different set of friends
To those that she has left behind–
These won't be nearly so refined.

http://hlod.net/bolek/Word-s/Charlie%20and%20the%20Chocolate%20Factory.txt

[Cha]

28. I knew she was the Worst kind of Coward

back in Oct 2002 when she voted for the Iraqi War Resolution without even reading the 90 page NIE. She wanted political expediency to run for pres in 2008 and it didn't matter that people would die. All that mattered was that hilary look TOUGH. Is she a TOUGH enough Coward, yet?

[dorktv]

35. From what I have read on here:

Senator Obama votes present. He does not vote yea or nay. Maybe it is a small thing but while Senator Clinton voted yea when she should have voted nay, she at least voted. And caught hell for it as she should have.

Senator Obama refuses to take a position. How is that anything but cowardly?

[PurityOfEssence]

36. and Barack Obama is a fake

He's always been against the war, even though this is no more true than it was for Dean or Clark. Obama spoke out once when it was the only safe position with his constituency at the time. Had he been vehemently against it, he would have spoken repeatedly. He's voted repeatedly to fund it. He's said in public that he might have voted for it when asked in relation to Edwards' and Kerry's votes; anyone who wants to say that this was white-lying to support the ticket doesn't know what politickin' is.

He's all for acceptance and multi-culturalism, but the McClurkin affair shows that he'll fuck over a group for personal gain at the drop of a hat. He's proud to support Raila Odinga, regardless of the fact that extreme Islamism to the exclusion of any other religions is the guy's major platform. He's virulently against Clinton's vote for the Iran Sense of the Senate after Edwards brings it up and makes some hay with it, but he couldn't deign to even show up and vote for this INCREDIBLY important vote. This is standard for him: he's ducked MANY, MANY votes in his years as a legislator, and it smacks of avoidance and plausible deniability.

He really cares about health care, even though his wife makes $316K a year as an administrator for a medical center that routinely shakes down uninsured patients for bills that are inflated by as much as 350%. She regularly portrays herself as a working mom "just like you", when she makes more than six thousand dollars a week.

He winks and nods at the Farrakhan's of the world, and he belongs to a church who's pastor is anything but a "let's all be together" pan-culturalist. He uses religion shamelessly in public, although who knows? Perhaps he really DOES want a more theocratic America.

Being an honorable community organizer, he's had a long and beneficial relationship with a guy who sleazes city redevelopment funds to finance slumlording, and is himself financially sustained by a guy who was convicted in an assassination plot against the then-Iraqi President in 1959 along with no other than Saddam Hussein. This guy, Nadhmi Auchi, is Rezko's sugar daddy; he's a real eye-opener when looked up on Wikipedia and went on to being a big shot in Saddam's Ministry of Oil and the Ambassador to Luxembourg, where he was a vigorous arms merchant for Hussein. Obama portrays himself as not having skeletons in the closet, but this one's going to be hard to explain away when the Republicans get going. If Obama at least admitted that he'd had some unsavory associates, he wouldn't be such a fake, but he doesn't; he's a graceful stride away from performing in white robes in public.

He'll smile along with the extremely racist and bigoted black gospel churchgoers, winking and nodding that he's one of them, but when the time comes, he'll help gay rights if it's to his overall benefit.

All in all, I'd say his character flaws and opportunism are only slightly worse than Hillary Clinton's, but that's a very damning thing to say.

Your guy's living in a glass house, so be careful how many stones you want to start throwing at Senator Clinton. She knows how to fight back.

What a disturbing choice we have.

[dorktv]

42. Is it even possible for a politician to get close to the White House

without some serious compromising of their principles?

I cannot think of any outside of Jimmy Carter and while he is a great man, he was not a great president.

[annie1]

44. he did NOT have to put mcclurkin on tour

[dorktv]

47. I have been so out of this race...on purpose...I even avoided DU

for months then I come back and everyone has lost their damn minds.

I loves ya but you all are crazy.

[PurityOfEssence]

48. Probably not,

but if we're going to indulge in attempts at accuracy, a little fairness is in order.

This guy disturbs me. His more vehement supporters annoy me as grating religious zealots. The question of his electability is EXTREMELY up-in-the-air, and THAT'S what should be the most serious issue at the moment since the candidates' policies are so very, very similar.

The problem with relativism is that it's used as a justification to tolerate one person's failings, but the reciprocation never seems to be there.

[dorktv]

54. I have not seen him being willing to be tough. I know he is all about hope and light

but really, you have to have the nerve to be as nasty as LBJ sometimes while trying to be as hopeful as JFK (who also could be pretty nasty)

[PurityOfEssence]

61. Frank Zappa put it best: "The Meek shall inherit nothing"

The more I hear and see the word "hope", the more it grates on me. The definition itself is cloying enough, but the connotations are pathetic. It conjures up sweet, innocent waifs wringing their hands with up-stretched faces and plaintive eyes, yearning for some external something to SAVE them. The sheer passivity of the concept is stunning. It, by definition, is EXTREMELY passive, unless you think that praying is active, which I don't.

He lopes around with this big smile, casually being agreeable with every fiber in his being and he imitates the rhetorical flourishes of preachers in an attempt at ascending to the podium of superstardom, but I don't even find him to be much of an orator.

He is, for me, the biggest Emperor with no clothes I've ever seen in American politics. He is NOT the towering figure of newness that so many seem to believe, and his schtick is old and sloppy.

[annie1]

43. You rock.

[QC]

59. Excellent post! n/t

[mtnsnake]

41. Hillary is a fearless fighter. You Obamawhiners are a collective bunch of pansy-assed dorks.

[backscatter712]

53. There's that sexist language again...

Really, you should learn to control your tempers...

[Utopian Leftist]

45. Hillary is a coward

There is an old saying that if you don't stand for something, you will fall for anything.

Hillary and Bill Clinton both lack the COURAGE of their convictions! It is their belief that the only way for the Democratic Party to win the White House is to cowtow to the right and move the party in that direction. That's why we lost Congress in 1994 and why Al Gore came close to losing the 2000 Election.

[mtnsnake]

58. Why is it that you just quoted Rush Limbaugh practically word for word?

Why are you here?

[backscatter712]

60. Very true. It also explains why she's still in the race.

Even though her campaign has resorted to tactics of desperation, even though the math shows she can't win unless Obama eats a baby on live TV, she's still in it.

She's using tactics that are damaging herself as well as Obama, and harming the Democratic Party and our chances to retake the Presidency in November.

She's afraid of losing.

She's terrified of giving that concession speech.

She doesn't want to explain her loss to her backers, or to her voters. She doesn't want to be called to the carpet to explain where all those millions of dollars went after victory slipped from her grasp. Fear of losing face...

John Edwards, by comparison, bowed out with grace and dignity, and has my respect and the respect of everyone here at DU, and the respect of millions. I wished he could have stayed in longer.

[Rosemary2205]

62. Unrfreakinbelievable. - where do you people come up with this crap?

Look, I voted Obama (my first choice was Edwards) - but come one. HILLARY IS A COWARD.

You've got to be kidding.

That's just so assinine it isn't even worth a conversation.

[MonkeyFunk]

69. I guess the mods consider this trash to be

"constructive criticism"

[Pisces]

65. Excellent post