Hillary's Rough Week
By Mark I Posted in 2008 — Comments (6) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
Originally posted at Political-Buzz.com
If the Clinton campaign thought that their candidate was going to enjoy a week of relatively uncritical media attention—as if the mainstream press ever really criticizes Hillary Clinton—it cannot be pleased with the way things turned out.
The week began with the introduction of Sen. Clinton’s much anticipated and ballyhooed health care plan. The speech was treated with all the fanfare and media attention that a State of the Union address would command; but the candidate was not quite up to the task. The famously guarded and scripted Clinton resorted to hyperbole and scare tactics in lieu of arguments in her health care rollout, and stepped on her own message. She carelessly stated that “Here in America, people are dying because they couldn’t get the care that they needed.” Dying, Sen. Clinton? Really? No, not really.
Read on...
A Federal law known as the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) requires that any patient, regardless of ability to pay or Medicare/Medicaid eligibility, that presents himself to a hospital or a hospital’s emergency services must receive stabilizing treatment. Sen. Clinton’s image of emergency rooms filled with poor dying patients is both easily refutable and takes the focus off the candidate’s plan and puts it on her claim. That’s not exactly good message delivery, especially for a candidate that touts herself as the most experienced and prepared Democrat in the field.
Sen. Clinton, faced with vigorous pushback from the three leading Republicans, found herself on the defensive in subsequent media interviews the following day. Rudy Giuliani labeled her health plan as a, “prescription for an increase in wait times, decrease in patient care, and higher taxes to pay for it all.” Fred Thompson was similarly dismissive, calling the plan, “enough to make you sick.” Mitt Romney explained that Sen. Clinton’s plan wasn’t exactly the Massachusetts miracle, calling it, “a one-size-fits-all nationalized plan.” And now, barely four days after the big announcement date, no one is talking about HillaryCare 2.0. Indeed, it seems to have gone the way of the Y2K bug: all hype, no impact.
People will be talking about Hillary Clinton this weekend, just not for the reasons she would’ve liked, thanks to Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) and a little Sense of the Senate resolution that passed early Thursday afternoon. Senator Cornyn offered an amendment to the 2008 FY Defense Appropriations Bill that condemned last week’s moveon.org New York Times ad that called General David Petraeus a traitor. Recall that Giuliani scored points against Clinton on Friday of last week when he ran his own Times ad criticizing Clinton for her remarks to the general during his Senate testimony that basically called him a liar. “I think the reports that you provide to us really require the willing suspension of disbelief,” she said. Now comes Senator Cornyn and his amendment. How would Clinton vote? Would she find her Sister Souljah moment and vote to condemn the almost universally recognized outrageous attacks on a serving four-star general? Or would she side with her radical, left wing, defeatist base and vote to sustain the “politics of personal destruction” that she and her husband president once decried? She chose the latter. Given the opportunity to shore up the center, she instead chose to pour more resources into her left flank. Republicans won’t have to move too far right to exploit that opening.
Sen. Clinton is running a national campaign. She has long since stopped responding to her Democratic rivals and is trying to tack to the center to win over moderate and independent voters for the general election. But the events of this week have cast her as ever more liberal and ever more dependant on and responsive to her far left power base. This couldn’t have been how they drew it up in the vaunted Clinton War Room on Sunday. There’s almost no chance she loses the Democratic nomination, but many more weeks like this one, and she may well lose her status as heir apparent to the throne.
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Hillary's Rough Week 6 Comments (0 topical, 6 editorial, 0 hidden) Post a comment »
"We now have the luxury of watching this Socialist literally implode during the next six months -"
So, tell me how you really feel about her?
Good post F4TR, I cracked up laughing out of complete agreement. Funny stuff.
Come on in Al!!
LOL HR&iB,
Just wait....with "America's Biggest Loser" only in it's 3rd week of the new season, if we suddenly see a new contestant on there from the State of Tennesee looking to shed about 65 pounds, we'll know Hillary's days are numbered!
Expect Hillary to drop more of the latter. The question is can her advisers, therapists, and the media, find enough scotch tape and glue to keep this disturbed woman together over the coming months. As such we may anticipate oodles of alarms about the health care crisis, people dying in the streets, etc, and the foreign model of the week that we should imitate.
Keep "vetting" Hillary, and take your meds.
"a man's admiration for absolute government is proportinate to the contempt he feels for those around him". Tocqueville
Didn't I just read this post?
This blogger gives conservatives everywhere a bad name. People aren’t dying because they don’t have access to emergency care – people (in redstates AND bluestates) are dying because they can't afford either health insurance coverage premiums or preventative care. And, according to this blogger, that is some sort of a crime.
EMTALA doesn’t cover mammograms or pap smears or colonoscopies or even a simple blood test. If you actually read the law, which this author clearly has not, it specifically bars hospitals from refusing “emergency treatment.” It also provides hospitals with numerous loopholes which permit them to refuse treatment to dying patients if another hospital is better prepared to accept emergency patients.
Not dying?… are you kidding? Seriously, have you never been to a rural hospital emergency room where folks are admitted with Stage 4 cancer under EMTALA, who might not be in need life-saving care if they could have afforded an annual physical? Should these Americans really be condemned for not being able to afford health care? “People are dying” hardly seems like a careless statement for a Presidential candidate to make when it’s true.
Hillary’s plan might be wrongheaded, unworkable and just plain stupid but at least she’s addressing a real problem. If Rudy and Fred think that health care is a purely lefty issue, they're going to alienate a huge part of their base. Whoever wants to win the election next year better be able to get their head out of Iraq for a moment and get back to some of the real problems here at home.
And, by the way, “hyperbole” is a device used to provide emphasis in a way that’s clearly not meant to be taken literally – like “it’s hot as hell.” Hillary’s statement is not hyperbole (although kudos to the author for trying to sound persuasive by using an SAT word). While it’s true that “People are dying” may well be dripping with pathos, it hardly invalidates her arguments. If that were true, the author’s argument would be on very shaky ground indeed.
Back in his earlier post, this blogger responded to criticisms of his arguments by asserting that uninsured people should have gone to the emergency room...
"[b]ecause then they would've been cared for. Or maybe they should have bought health insurance, or gone to the doctor, or ate right, or stopped smoking, drinking, using drugs, or stopped engaging in high risk occupations, or looked for a job that provided health insurance or... These are mainly individual choices. How does this become society's problem?"
Um... it becomes society's problem when the costs of healthcare skyrocket for everyone because of all of the uninsured people showing up at the ER's front door. As far as the author's other brilliant solutions to the health care crisis, his arrogant and purely heartless attitudes are the type of thing that make people hate us conservatives. Seriously, I've had enough of this Limbaugh/O'Reilly vitrol. It was fun for a while but now it just makes us look like vicious morons.
If this is represents the level of "reporting" we can look forward to on PoliticalMachine, it looks like AOL's got themselves another winner.
Mary C
Yes, the fact that Hillary Clinton has the seemingly insurmountable lead over Obama and Edwards and the rest, and that her own camp has spoken to the inevitability of her nomination....yes, the fact that it has come soooooo early, is like a Christmas present to the Republican Party. We now have the luxury of watching this Socialist literally implode during the next six months - to the point that the DNC calls an emergency weekend meeting with a certain Democrat invited who they will plead with to enter the race and save any chances of a victory in '08. The person they will call in to save them? Well, think carbon, polar bears and the internet.