For Clinton, the 'Bill' may be overdue
March 2, 2008 - 9:37am.
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Former President Bill Clinton on the campaign trail: A help or a negative for his wife? (AP Photo)
From the beginning, political pros worried that Bill Clinton would be the real problem for Hillary Clinton's quest to become America's first woman President. It wasn't just just the womanizing that bothered campaign strategists but they also expressed concerns about his enormous ego and desire to hog the spotlight.
As Hillary heads into make or break primaries in Ohio and Texas, the "Bill" is about to come due and it is not the deal breaker her strategists worried about at the campaign's beginnings.
Hillary is not losing ground in Ohio or trailing in Texas because of her husband's skirt chasing or his bombastic campaign appearances. She is suffering because of something he actually accomplished as President: The controversial North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
NAFTA became reality during Bill Clinton's watch and it looms large as the hot button issue that could sink his wife's hopes for the Democratic nomination.
Writes Richard Sisk of The New York Daily News:
Hillary Clinton's campaign in must-have Ohio is struggling to hold onto its core - white, working-class women over 50.
"No way, Gino. I'm sorry but no way I'm voting for her," Barbara Rice told Gino Carbenia, an affable union rep and well-known local guy who came to her door with Clinton handouts.
In between swipes with her snow shovel at the blizzard over northeast Ohio, the 65-year-old teacher said, "I have my reasons" for rejecting Clinton, and "her husband is one."
It's not Bill Clinton the loose cannon of the 2008 primary trail who turns off voters here. It's the President Bill Clinton who, in 1994, pushed through the North American Free Trade Agreement, which Ohioans blame for the exodus of factory jobs. Barack Obama is trying at every turn to hang the NAFTA sign around Hillary's neck.
Despite her pledges to renegotiate NAFTA, "Sen. Clinton just has the bad luck of being associated with her husband's administration," said Case Western Reserve University's Alexander Lamis.
In both Ohio and Texas, polls follow a familiar pattern. Clinton's once-large leads are gone. She trails in Texas and Ohio is a toss-up, giving Barack Obama a shot at capturing both states.
Clinton campaing insiders admit they expect to lose Texas and possibly Ohio. Two weeks ago, Bill Clinton told voters in Texas that if she loses there the race is over. Campaign spin doctors are now trying to distance themselves, once again, from an off-the-cuff remark from the President.
But the polls look bleak.
Democrat Hillary Clinton narrowly trails rival Barack Obama in Texas and the two are virtually tied in Ohio ahead of critical contests that could decide the fate of her presidential bid, according to a Reuters/C-SPAN/Houston Chronicle poll released on Sunday.
Clinton faces heavy pressure to win in both big states on Tuesday and halt the Illinois senator's momentum after his 11 consecutive victories in their battle to become the Democratic nominee in November's presidential election.
Clinton, a New York senator and former first lady, has seen big poll leads disappear in both states over the last two weeks as Obama seized control of the Democratic race with his winning streak.
She now trails Obama in Texas by 4 points, 47 percent to 43 percent, up from a 2-point edge for Obama on Saturday. Obama's strength in the state's big cities and among men, young voters and blacks has offset her advantage with the state's sizable bloc of Hispanics and older voters.
Clinton still holds leads in heavily Hispanic south Texas and conservative west Texas, but Obama has pulled virtually even among women voters, usually one of her strongest constituencies.
In Ohio, Clinton has a statistically insignificant 1-point edge on Obama, 47 percent to 46 percent, after the two were dead even on Saturday. That is well within the margin of error of 3.7 percentage points in the poll conducted by Zogby International.
As Clinton and Obama criss-crossed the state last week, Ohio was buffeted by new hits to its already cratered economy.
Many things have gone wrong with the Clinton campaign but her biggest failure may be her husband.
Writes Paul Harris in The London Observer:
Clinton is in the battle of her life and the odds are against her. And it is not only a fight to be the next occupant of the White House. It is also about the legacy that Clinton and her husband, Bill, have left America and whether they still have a role to play.
They are also willing to play nasty to emerge victorious. American TV screens are now full of one of the most aggressive attack ads in recent history. Dubbed 'Children', it in effect suggests that a vote for Barack Obama will lead to such weakness on national security that the American homeland will be in peril. It is shot over pictures of sleeping babies and it appeals directly to the 'security moms' demographic that Clinton needs.
But the facts on the ground remain the same. It has finally come down to this: on Tuesday, Clinton needs to win Texas and Ohio. Anything less could force her from the race and spell the end of the Clinton dynasty. The revered Clinton brand, once so confident of a second act, is now desperately fighting to stop the curtain coming down early.
James C. Humes, a visiting fellow in history at the University of Colorado, writes in the Pueblo Chiefain:
A president is barred by his country’s constitution from having more than two terms. So he has his best friend and most loyal associate become his party’s candidate for president.
That scenario describes the president of Russia, but also Bill Clinton, who was described by a former New York City congressman, John Le Boutillier, as the “American Putin.”
Before this presidential election year, Clinton had joined George H.W. Bush in promoting disaster and hunger relief and other international charitable causes in Asia and Africa. Clinton, already a popular figure in the world, had enhanced his image as a world statesman.
Now he has sullied that perception as he supplanted the image of a respected former president for that of a pit bull by savaging his wife’s opponent, Barack Obama. As Newsweek’s editor in chief, Evan Thomas, wrote, “His badgering and baiting her principal opponent” is a naked attempt to do something truly unprecedented, “an unelected, unofficial but nonetheless true co-presidency.”
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NAFTA was designed and
NAFTA was designed and projected in President Bush 41's term and is one of the reasons Perot took his votes. The deficit in 1992 was over a trillion dollars due to the imbalance of the trades themselves. America lost money in both Canada and Mexico because it was an unfair advantage to America. Well Perot never got through to the voters and he gave up.
Clinton gets elected and was delighted to continue and pass NAFTA. It shows me that neither man had a clue on the problems of our economics and certainly how to keep the value of the dollar up. Our Congress probably never took an economics class in all their fancy university classes.
Do we continue to build our trade deficits (now nearly 6 trillion) or do we demand that this treaty be written to benefit all nations involved? Do we have a candidate who can do this this and understand why it was done wrong?
Perot was determined to put America on an even keel in all trade agreements and treaties. 12% of the voters realized that he did and the rest were simply ignorant of what he said.
Many of us here at CHB did take the time to look carefully at the problems of these treaties and trade agreements and we began to look at the fix. We lean in the direction of the Libertarian agenda with a focus on the Constitution first, and the economic debt second.
If Hillary is elected she will have to spend her first 4 years cleaning up after her husband to protect his legacy. I have no idea what Obama will do but McCain will bomb/nuke Iran and turn the rest of the planet against America.
I believe that you are
I believe that you are mixing terminologies incorrectly.
In 1992*, the balance of trade deficit was less than $100 billion; the trillion-dollar-plus figure that you mentioned should have been a reference to the national debt. Nor do you explain how the trade imbalance causes the national debt to rise - one is predicated on government borrowing, the other on our collective buying of imports well in excess of exports. In fact, according to the souce below, our trade imbalances did not start increasing significantly until the second Clinton term; since then they have continues to rise.
Nor are our current* balance-of-trade deficits anything like the $6 trillion you posted; the current value is about $700 billion. I believe that you have again confused the national debt with the trade imbalance.
------
*source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Economic_Growth...
Most sincerely,
T. J. Flapsaddle
I am not an economist, I'm a
I am not an economist, I'm a victim.
It seems to me that there are a variety of economic problems, including NAFTA, and they all need to be addressed.
We have a huge debt load with China and we buy a lot of stuff made from China. China is not a NAFTA member.
The tax code has been perverted to give corporations tax breaks for offshoring jobs. That is a domestic tax issue, not a treaty issue.
Deregulation fever has allowed key industries to become rotten to the core, gouging consumers with impunity. This is internal legal code, not NAFTA.
Labor is taxed at a rate twice that of stock investments, which means that the rich get richer for sitting on their fat asses while the rest of us work harder for less money, less benefits, longer hours, zero loyalty from our employers, no union protection, little meaningful discrimination protection, skyrocketing health insurance costs (I repeat myself), no meaningful raises, and inflation on basic items such as food, fuel, and housing continues to make me wonder how anyone could survive.
We're putting it on our credit cards, I think.
So anyway, NAFTA probably needs to be looked at, but there are plenty of other opportunities to turn around what has become the status quo. The status quo today is that there is an investor class, the top echelon of which manipulates the money in this country, and the rest of us get the crumbs that fall off their table while they blame us for not being clever enough to become the thieves they are.
-Wexler
I agree Wexler, but Doug
I agree Wexler, but Doug focused on NAFTA. China was given "Special Nation Privileges" that even Bill Clinton said was a mistake. Corporate Welfare should be stopped and America arming other nations should be looked into as many of our service men in Afghanistan are being killed with our weapons given to them against Russia.
Sandra wrote: Many of us
Sandra wrote:
Sandra, I, too consider myself a Libertarian. But, like you, I'm also a realist.
The days when our country could look at our economy in isolation from other economies in the world are now LONG gone. For decades (particularly immediately after World War II) our economy was firmly based on what I call the horrendously polluting "smokestack" industries of heavy manufacturing. But, thanks largely to advances in the manufacturing-based offspring of the computer revolution called "robotics", most of those manufacturing jobs that once employed millions of our countrymen have not now just been "exported"...they've evaporated completely.
What's more, whether we choose to like it or not, world economies are now very much interdependent. And blaming treaties like NAFTA for rising unemployment and the massive job losses in our manufacturing sector, rather than on our own stubborn refusal to re-educate and re-direct our workforce in light of changing world realities, simply attacks the symptom of the problem rather than the problem itself.
For whatever the reason, the truth is that FAR too many of us simply haven't taken the initiative and/or "done what it takes" to keep ourselves (and our businesses) competitive in an ever more competitive (and changing) global marketplace.
A classic example of our increasing non-competitiveness in the world occurred just this week when the European aircraft consortium Airbus beat out our own US manufacturer...Boeing... for a HUGE order for new aerial tanker aircraft for our US Air Force.
The deal, immediately worth some $40 Billion (but conceivably worth upwards of $100 Billion to replace the whole 600 aircraft fleet) was, on all fronts, a "no brainer". The Airbus entry beat out Boeing on four of five critical selection criteria and tied them on the fifth. The Airbus entry will be larger, faster, and (from a mission-effectiveness standpoint) cheaper to both purchase and operate. It will also be able to fly more cargo and offload more fuel at a faster rate than the Boeing entry.
By any measure, Boeing's entry was simply non-competitive. And, our own US Air Force...who have the taxpayers of the nation and our war fighter's interests at heart...clearly made the right decision for our country as a whole.
Now, one very big upside of that deal is that Airbus plans to assemble the new aircraft in Alabama and to also move all of their worldwide assembly operations of the commercial version of that aircraft (the Airbus 330) to that new plant in the United States. The contract will create upwards of 1500 new aerospace jobs in Alabama, with some 25,000 jobs for U.S. suppliers overall.
But, even with that activity, only 58 percent of the new aerial tanker (as compared to upwards of 80 percent for the Boeing entry) will now be manufactured in the USA. To me, that fact speaks volumes about Boeing's lagging competitiveness in the world's marketplace as compared with our European competition.
And as you might guess, the howls of protest from some of our elected representatives (particularly those in Washington State where Boeing has major manufacturing plants) have already started. Whether the politicians will now overrule economic reality (or common sense) remains to be seen.
I find it ironic that many of our posting here on CHB love to rip into President Bush for his "my way or the highway" isolationist approach to foreign policy in an increasingly interdependent world. Yet we seem to have no difficulty in demanding our government adopt the exact same isolationist approach to jobs and being competitive in an ever more competitive world economy.
And, while we are all harping on our Constitution, the last time I read it, nowhere did it say that everyone in our country is guaranteed a job. What's more, we are no longer "king of the hill" when it comes to dictating what and how the rest of the world buys its goods, or who it buys them from. That means, we now have NO CHOICE but to compete with the rest of the world.... increasingly on THEIR terms...not ours.
It seems to me that, rather than harping about who gets what slice of an ever-shrinking manufacturing "pie" in our country, I should think our politicians' time would be much better spent helping us all to find (or make) a bigger one.
Oh, I agree with Doug & you,
Oh, I agree with Doug & you, too.
I just think that if NAFTA were to somehow magically be fixed to whatever the perfect formula is for America, we'd still have a boatload of problems in the areas of economics and trade. Which is to say, I believe that NAFTA has become a political football when perhaps it ought to be more of a golf ball.
-Wexler
Nice rant, Keith, but
Nice rant, Keith, but Bushco's foreign policy has been anything but isolationist. Quite the opposite, in fact. Pre-emptive wars, endless back-door and even front-door deals for Israel, replacing the government in Palestine, hanging Saddam, banging the war drum with Iran and Syria, the list is endless. I WISH Bush even remotely resembled an isolationist.
You are correct, maybe the
You are correct, maybe the word "isolationist" IS a misleading description.
"Self serving" (or even "myopic") might be better descriptions...on both counts.
You bet Keith. But self
You bet Keith. But self serving to Bush and his comrades not to America first. I read about the Boeing loss on another forum and was very disappointed that we are still not competitive. Several years ago I read Thomas Friedman's fabulous book "The World is Flat" and he explained much of what we discuss here.
Our corporations are not competitive and our kids are not academically prepared to design the million things that we need to compete. My husband was a physics professor at Caltech and Berkeley and he moaned and groaned about the kids who could not write about what they learned. This was in the 60s.
How did we let our academic edge fall apart? Some say television was the culprit.
Sandra wrote: How did we let
Sandra wrote:
Sandra, TV is only part of the problem.
When I was studying for my first Master's degree (in Human Relations/Psychology...I also have another one in Business plus a BA in Geology), I recall one of my professors making the comment that, "Good parents damage kids."
We have been far too "comfortable" for far too long. Most children born in the generations after WW II...even the poorest of us... have never really known true hardship.
That's probably due, at least in part, because Mommy and Daddy wanted each new generation to have more than they did. So now, "having more" has morphed in some God-given right for multiple blessings that MUST flow from some stupid government program somewhere, rather than something that one must actually expend time and effort (including getting educated) to achieve.
And, before people scream that many of us are too poor to "get educated", with as many libraries (and free literacy programs) as we now have in our nation, there is absolutely NO excuse whatsoever (except perhaps, sheer laziness) why 15 million of us (at last count) were still functionally illiterate.
Sadly, we have become a nation of people increasingly dependent on (if not addicted to) government rather than being dependent on ourselves. And, all too often (and in far too many ways) such dependency now equates to little more than slavery.
Our Declaration of Independence says that one of our inalienable rights as human beings is that of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness". Unfortunately, as a nation we seem to have forgotten that such a right DOES NOT also mean that happiness is to be "guaranteed" by government. It only means that governments (including ours) should create and encourage conditions that allow the governed to be free to pursue it.
Or, to put it another way, FAR too many of us in the United States are now spending WAY too much time sitting on our rearward facing anatomies and (loudly!) complaining about what the government has (or has not yet) "given us".
These days, I look at pictures of young children in Asia...youngsters who regularly go to school six days a week year round, and who are now out-learning ours in almost every facet of education...and think, "There's my granddaughter's competition...how is she ever going to be able to compete with them in tomorrow's world?"
Keith, I was born to great
Keith, I was born to great wealth. But I was one of 23 other first cousins and when the grandparents died I went from Saxs 5th Avenue to Penneys. My kids had absolutely no concept of the wealth I was raised in and all I could give them was the best education possible. I worked 2 and sometimes 3 jobs to keep them in private school but we had a freezing cold house and we all spent time searching for fire wood. I drove a 13 year old car and we had no television, radio or stereo. What my kids learned was to have all the toys and luxuries, they had to go to work and make the money. They all learned well. I was the one who had to learn the hard way that wealth and possessions meant nothing without an understanding of right vs wrong. The day I gave up the family religion was the day I had my freedoms; and still have them.....
Well Sandra, your story is
Well Sandra, your story is living, breathing proof of the way things ought to work in our country...that we should have to work for everything that comes our way.
My parents weren't rich by the standards of today when I was growing up in the 1950s and 60s. My (now deceased) Dad was a mid-level US government civil servant and my Mom was a stay at home housewife. And, while I was an only child, just like you did with your children, I was always taught that you have to work for what you want in this world.
Fortunately for me, I had the good sense to listen to my parents. And, thanks to the critical help from an academic scholarship that I managed to earn along the way, I'm pleased to report that my earlier study, life planning and hard work eventually paid off in a "comfortable" lifestyle.
However, I've always believed that my country would only offer me the OPPORTUNITY to excel. What I did with that opportunity was entirely up to me.
Absolutely! My grandmother,
Absolutely! My grandmother, being a Mormon, would sit me down and discuss what I could tithe without earning a dime while I was in school. I learned that I could give 10% of my time to some kind of charity. I just finished up a 4-year term on the Board of Directors as Marketing manager and I took no money for this. I am now on the Board of Compassion and Choices of N.W. Phoenix, working on bringing death with dignity to Arizona. Big Brothers, Big Sisters is another group that I gather goods for their work. My kids also give money and time to those who are in need.
America has offered me many ways to serve those less fortunate and I receive joy from my work. I have been paid back in many ways.
As bad as NAFTA may or may
As bad as NAFTA may or may not be GATT and WTO are much worse and for the reasons alluded to above.
China is our biggest economic Albatross and is not going away anytime soon.