Hillary and Edwards share a moment

[Hometown]

With all due respect PMCalk, Clinton gave us the only balanced budget in my lifetime.

Through his leadership he disciplined Congress and delivered what Republicans could only talk about.  Many Democrats were voted out of office because of the unpopular cuts that were made to balance the budget.

You may recall that at the end of his presidency we had a surplus and we were moving towards a solution for looming social security deficits.

Clinton gave us welfare reform.  Again, something the Republicans could only talk about.

Clinton gave us peace.  No small deal.

Clinton's hallmark was compromise and a bipartisan spirit.

He didn't engender a new era but he made the best of what we had to deal with.

I find Obama very appealing but unseasoned.  He has gotten a free ride from the press.  The Clintons are about as vetted as you can get.  With Obama we have surprises ahead of us.  And he isn't riding a cultural gestalt like Reagan did.  Where are the great new ideas?  All I've heard are platitudes.

[Conan71]

quote:Originally posted by Hometown

With all due respect PMCalk, Clinton gave us the only balanced budget in my lifetime.

Through his leadership he disciplined Congress and delivered what Republicans could only talk about.  Many Democrats were voted out of office because of the unpopular cuts that were made to balance the budget.

You may recall that at the end of his presidency we had a surplus and we were moving towards a solution for looming social security deficits.

Clinton gave us welfare reform.  Again, something the Republicans could only talk about.

Clinton gave us peace.  No small deal.

Clinton's hallmark was compromise and a bipartisan spirit.

He didn't engender a new era but he made the best of what we had to deal with.

I find Obama very appealing but unseasoned.  He has gotten a free ride from the press.  The Clintons are about as vetted as you can get.  With Obama we have surprises ahead of us.  And he isn't riding a cultural gestalt like Reagan did.  Where are the great new ideas?  All I've heard are platitudes.

Clinton balanced the budget with a more disciplined Republican Congress, HT.

I don't know what the hell ever happened to those conservatives.  

You really do lisp out both sides of your mouth.  On the one hand, Clinton was some sort of budget hawk and is to be admired, yet you constantly throw scorn at the biggest budget hawk in Washington- Senator Coburn.

How's your neighbor today?

[pmcalk]

quote:Originally posted by Hometown

With all due respect PMCalk, Clinton gave us the only balanced budget in my lifetime.

Through his leadership he disciplined Congress and delivered what Republicans could only talk about.  Many Democrats were voted out of office because of the unpopular cuts that were made to balance the budget.

You may recall that at the end of his presidency we had a surplus and we were moving towards a solution for looming social security deficits.

Clinton gave us welfare reform.  Again, something the Republicans could only talk about.

Clinton gave us peace.  No small deal.

Clinton's hallmark was compromise and a bipartisan spirit.

He didn't engender a new era but he made the best of what we had to deal with.

I find Obama very appealing but unseasoned.  He has gotten a free ride from the press.  The Clintons are about as vetted as you can get.  With Obama we have surprises ahead of us.  And he isn't riding a cultural gestalt like Reagan did.  Where are the great new ideas?  All I've heard are platitudes.

I appreciate your response, and again I should say I personally supported, and still like, the Clintons.  Yes, Clinton did achieve some things, like a balanced budget.  But because of his lack of popularity, he was unable to deliver on some very important issues, like healthcare reform (which as you remember was a key issue on which he ran).  Personally, I believe that the democrats that lost in 1994 did so because of his/Hillary's botched attempt at health care reform.  They lost the PR war on that before they even started.  Because he no strong public backing, he continually backed off of his promises, like his promise to allow gays in the Military.  Again, true democrats like you and I look at the Clinton presidency as a time of prosperity.  But if you ask independents/conservative democrats/liberal republicans what they recall most about the Clinton presidency, you will hear travelgate, nannygate, whitewater, Monica Lewinsky, special prosecutors, government shutdown, etc....  And, IMO, much of that anger at the Clinton presidency cost Al Gore the election in 2000.

My point again is simply that between Obama and Clinton, I believe that Obama has a much better chance of pulling in non-democrats so that we as a nation can tackle some difficult issues (like healthcare reform and campaign finance reform).  

I have many friends that vote issues, whether registered democrat or republican.  Not one of them has said they would vote for Hillary.  Fair or not, I don't think they would even consider it.  If the race comes down to McCain vs. Clinton, absent some unforeseen event, I suspect will be speaking about President McCain very soon.  Or worse, an election that is so narrowly won that we see nothing happen for the next four years.

[Hometown]

Well I shelled out on Kerry and shifted my support to Wes Clark late in the last campaign.  My Wes Clark signs arrived after he had withdrawn.  Who knows what will happen.  There is a sort of legendary quality to the Chicago Democrat Machine.  You known, the unions, et cetera.

Conan, the Clintons are about results.  Coburn is about endless pointless posturing to advance his career.

Coburn should be representing the interests of Oklahomans in Washington.  And you better believe there are people still suffering from the ice storm all over this town!  It is time for your loser Republican friends to get out there and help these folks.

[USRufnex]

quote:Originally posted by Conan71

I caught a little bit of Hillary's BS on TV last night.  She's still running against Bush II.

Ruf, what's so great about Lugar?  I've heard you mention him several times in other posts.  Is it a Chicago thing or what?? []

A woman I sang with on a regular basis in Chicago worked on Lugar's presidential campaign in 1996, along with her husband.  At the time, Lugar seemed too intellectual to be running for president... which is probably why he lost early in the primaries...

I also had a fellow Lyric Opera of Chicago chorister who campaigned for Bill Clinton for '92... when I asked him what kind of a prez Bill would be, he said, "This guy is going to be the best Republican president we ever had."  Think about it.  NAFTA, DOMA, welfare reform, balanced budget, gays in the military, REPUBLICAN HOUSE AND SENATE... []

Oh, off topic... more shameless name dropping... another guy I sang with in Chicago is doing a solo concert with the Signature Symphony 1/31 at TCC, next Thursday... last time I saw him over 10 years ago, the guy told me he was quitting opera to become a backup singer for Dolly Parton... and  now he's advertised as "International tenor" Roy Cornelius Smith... [^]

Anyway, the Obama commercial is the only one I've seen on cable so far... and there's a big pic of Lugar.  If you want a REAL GLIMPSE at what Obama's foreign policy would be like, look at Richard Lugar's positions... and read this:

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2006/0609.larson.html

--Washington Monthly, September 2006
Hoosier Daddy
What rising Democratic star Barack Obama can learn from an old lion of the GOP.

By Christina Larson

Many Americans aspire to be president, but only the fewest have a presidential-grade mentor. For those in the market for a guru, however, the Senate has a particularly good track record. In the 1940s, Congressman Gerald Ford learned about Washington and foreign policy from "my hometown hero" Michigan senator Arthur Vandenberg. In the 1950s, freshman senator Lyndon Johnson became a "professional son" to Georgia senator Richard Russell. In the 1960s, Senate intern Bill Clinton learned from a figure he'd "admired all my life," Arkansas Democrat William Fulbright.

Unlike these past relationships, however, the most dynamic duo in Washington today crosses party lines. Old-school realist Richard Lugar, the five-term Republican senator from Indiana, has embraced new-school realist and rising star Barack Obama, the junior Democratic senator from Illinois. The relationship is admiring. "I very much feel like the novice and pupil," Obama has said of Lugar. And it's warm. Lugar praises Obama's "strong voice and creativity" and calls him "my good friend." In short, the two agree on much and seem to genuinely like each other. Rather unusual in hyper-partisan Washington, these days.

Like most friendships inside the Beltway, this one involves some mix of affection and career advancement. But it is also built, rather charmingly, on shared wonkish interests. By most accounts, Obama and Lugar's working relationship began with nukes. On the campaign trail in 2004, Obama spoke passionately about the dangers of loose nukes and the legacy of the Nunn-Lugar nonproliferation program, a framework created by a 1991 law to provide the former Soviet republics assistance in securing and deactivating nuclear weapons. Lugar took note, as "nonproliferation" is about as common a campaign sound-bite for aspiring senators as "exchange-rate policy" or "export-import bank oversight." Soon after Obama won the election, the two men exchanged phone calls. Lugar, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, suggested that the younger senator aim for a seat on the committee; Obama did, successfully.

The two men grew closer in August of 2005, when Obama joined Lugar on a tour of Russia and Eastern Europe to inspect weapons facilities, a trip that Lugar makes annually. For the younger senator, it was a chance to see first-hand the situation that had long unsettled the older statesman. In Kiev, they visited a pathogen laboratory, an unsecured nondescript downtown building, where the senators were shown a storage unit resembling a mini-refrigerator that contained vast rows of test tubes. Some tubes held anthrax; others, the plague. As Obama has recounted the story, "At this point I turned around and said 'Hey, where's Lugar? Doesn't he want to see this?'" But the older senator was standing in the back of the room, nonchalantly. "Been there, done that," Lugar said.

The two men were also detained for several hours in the Russian town of Perm, when local border officials suddenly demanded to search the senators' plane. After some angry phone calls from Washington, the plane was released, but, Lugar noted, "it makes you wonder who really is running the country."

Most important, though, may have been the timing of the senators' visit to Ukraine and Azerbaijan. Russia had chosen that moment to escalate a dispute with Ukraine over national gas by cutting off the pipeline that supplies Russian gas to Ukraine and Germany, threatening the economy of much of Western Europe. Meanwhile Azerbaijan's economy was set to go on steroids with the completion of its own gas pipeline to the West. The trip focused Obama's attention on the tight link between energy resources and national security—a longtime concern of Lugar's.

Something else unfamiliar happened on the trip—or at least something that rarely happens in the United States: Lugar overshadowed Obama. In Russia, where Lugar has been a regular visitor for the past 15 years, the senior senator from Indiana received generous media coverage and attention from political leaders, while the junior senator from Illinois sometimes went unrecognized. "If anybody has ever accompanied Senator Lugar on a trip," Obama would later joke to an audience at the Council on Foreign Relations, "you know that he is a rock star wherever he goes."

After returning to Washington, Lugar and Obama co-sponsored legislation to update the Nunn-Lugar program. The resulting law, which expands the nonproliferation program for nuclear arms to conventional weapons and WMDs, is called the Lugar-Obama Act, a name that "virtually rolls off the tongue," in the approving words of Scripps-Howard columnist Martin Schram. This March, Lugar and Obama introduced the American Fuels Act of 2006, an ambitious bill that would drive investment in biomass ethanol. And, in late July, the two senators were among the co-sponsors of a bill to raise automobile fuel-efficiency standards.

Of course, friendships across the Senate aisle aren't so unusual. (Ted Kennedy once composed a serenade for his teetotalling buddy Orrin Hatch: "Wherever I go/ I know Orrin goes/ no fits, no fights, no feuds, no egos/ amigos/ together.") But bipartisanship is uncommon in mentor relationships. One might expect Obama, for example, to sidle up to someone like John Kerry, or five-term Michigan Democrat Carl Levin. And Lugar might be expected to take a young Republican whippersnapper under his wing, both in the name of party loyalty and of molding Republicans of the future.

Still, if Obama wants to see any legislation with his name on it pass, then having a Republican teammate makes more sense. Unlike many Democrats in Congress, Lugar has the ability to get a few things done. And, if Lugar is looking to secure his legacy by passing on his moderate, substantive foreign-policy vision to someone who's open-minded, sensible, respectful, and destined for leadership, Obama's not a bad choice. To put it differently, what current Republican freshman would fit the bill?

Indeed, in a political atmosphere where conservatism increasingly appears to be leaving the realm of reason altogether, moderate Republican holdouts like Lugar begin to have more in common with characters across the aisle. While the GOP, led by the White House, has spent most of the decade trying to dismiss global warming as a liberal hoax, Lugar has since the late 1990s been calling for action on the problem and refers to the impasse over the issue as one that "sometimes leaves the science and becomes almost theological."

One reason Lugar can afford to speak his mind is that, at 74 years old, any ambitions for higher office are now behind him. In 1996, Lugar made a bid for the GOP presidential nomination that didn't go far, and he hasn't run since. Still, the past comes up once in a while. Recently, a Russian newspaper announcing Lugar's visit ran a picture from the 1996 campaign. According to The Chicago Tribune, the campaign photo prompted someone to ask Lugar if he would consider running for president again. The old lion shook his head and passed the torch. "That's for Barack," he said.

Christina Larson is the managing editor of The Washington Monthly.

[Conan71]

Ruf,

You don't think Obama might talk Lugar into running with him do you?  That's almost where that story was leading me.  Obviously, featurning Lugar in ads is designed to try and appeal to moderate Republicans.

[Conan71]

quote:Originally posted by pmcalk

Again, true democrats like you and I look at the Clinton presidency as a time of prosperity.  But if you ask independents/conservative democrats/liberal republicans what they recall most about the Clinton presidency, you will hear travelgate, nannygate, whitewater, Monica Lewinsky, special prosecutors, government shutdown, etc....  And, IMO, much of that anger at the Clinton presidency cost Al Gore the election in 2000.

I'll agree Clinton's years were a time of prosperity and I definitely benefitted from it.  I do tend to remember that most, but yes, there is an asterisk next to his name when I think of his presidency.

That time of prosperity was also an orgy of wild speculation on the internet, bio-tech, and telecom (there were a lot of salaries being paid on borrowed money) as well as a lot of book-cooking in the energy industry which made things appear more robust than they really were.

Clinton's record reflects some of the most conservative non-military discretionary spending of the 20th century.  But how much of that was Congress, how much was Clinton?

The shame of it is, he did bring a level of buffoonery and scorn to the White House which was impossible to ignore.  Some of his token appointments like Jocelyn Elder were completely laughable.  

I never really took White Water all that serious.  I figured it was petty retribution for Iran/Contra.    

Were it not for Clinton's sexual proclivities, and the subsequent impeachment (total waste of taxpayer resources, IMO) Gore likely could have kept the keys to the White House with 60% of the popular vote in 2000.  I also felt Clinton's support of Gore was tepid at best.  Either that or Gore was just trying to separate himself from the tainted legacy of Clinton.