Tilt the Scale Left: Hillary Clinton for SCOTUS? ( photo credit: David Boyle in DC)

Ugh… (and not because I am anti Clinton…I think she would throw herself into the job and make an excellent justice).

The Utah Republican, a high-ranking GOPer on the Senate Judiciary Committee, implied that Clinton could be a strong nominee.

“I even heard the name Hillary Clinton today, and that would be an interesting person in the mix,” Hatch said on the “Today Show.”

“I happen to like Hillary Clinton, I think she’s done agood job for the Democrat Secretary of State’s position. And I have high respect for her, and think a great deal of her.”

via Hatch mentions Clinton’s name for SCOTUS – The Hill’s Blog Briefing Room.

I think its best that Clinton remain Secretary of State for the duration of the Obama Administration’s first term and into the beginning of a second possible term. There is too much in the world hinging on effective, cohesive US diplomatic engagement to pull a principal out of the cabinet if it can be avoided.

In addition, as moderate as the Clintons have been, nominating Secretary Clinton may just set off the right wing base and unfounded grass roots outrage into an unnecessarily protracted confirmation battle.

But that says more about the complainers than it does about Obama himself. If you actually paid attention to the substance of what he was saying during the primary, you realized that

(a) There wasn’t a lot of difference among the major Democratic contenders

(b) To the extent that there was a difference, Obama was the least progressive

Now it’s true that many progressives were ardent Obama supporters, with their ardency mixed in with a fair bit of demonization of Hillary Clinton.

via The WYSIWYG president – Paul Krugman Blog – NYTimes.com.

I agree with Krugman on the point that many folks simply ignored some of Obama’s key policy points in the 2008 campaign and got swept up with hope-y change-y t-shirts and crying and hugging strangers.

I don’t think those people are the net roots for the most part. I think the problem with the net roots is that they forgot the limitations were never the 50+ senate caucus. It was always the swing votes in the opposition party to get to 60. George W. Bush had more Blue Dog Democrats willing to endorse all of his major first term initiatives without any compromise. People say his cunning got George W. Bush everything he wanted, I would say it was Nixon’s cunning that created the Southern Strategy and Reagan’s american chauvinism that compounded that and created the moderate as right of center Blue Dog Democrat. Post-9/11 political climate was a perfect environment to  shame Blue Dog and Hawk Democrats into knee jerk votes. If we were unhappy with what Democrats did in the senate from 2000 to 08, it should be painfully obvious that the Senate Democrats didn’t demand adequate concessions in exchange for their cooperation with George W. Bush’s platform and agenda.

To be fair, Clinton could have been expected to be  more progressive than Obama concerning health care and Women’s rights. It doesn’t mean a Clinton white house would be as close to getting a bill passed. On many other issues, I would doubt she would be more progressive from her slightly more conservative voting record and working affiliations as a Senator. Clinton was one of the Democrats that voted for a pre-authorized Iraq war. It was baffling at the time and Clinton’s explainations (I didn’t read the NIE and I trusted President Bush’s evidence) were both unacceptable. In addition Clinton’s deep relation with the”New Democrat” (read left of center, right of center left) DLC can not be ignored. Nor should her comments about creating a protective umbrella around all middle east nations vs Iran.

In addition, a candidate is policies and practice.

Also despite the “Obama the Arrogant” meme, Clinton’s campaign was the one built on brazen, reckless arrogance. Clinton pegged herself “inevitable” and proceeded to undervalue Iowa and the various state by state delegate rules. She had no long term branding strategy for her campaign and was struggling to find her footing well past Super Tuesday. In addition she burned through campaign cash at an alarming rate with wasteful spending. All of this would have been needed for a general campaign push. It was an awful way to start a bid for the presidency after Gore and Kerry campaigns and eight years of George W. Bush.

What we saw is what we got, but it wasn’t the “least progressive” candidate.

Remember this debate? Then Sen. Hillary Clinton was all: Meet me in Ohio! and then Sen. Barack Obama was all: fine then.

Monday November 23, 2009 Dave Winer.
I assumed that because we elected Obama to end the war in Iraq that it went without saying that the war in Afghanistan would be ended as well.

Apparently not so.

via No escalation in Afghanistan. (Scripting News).

This is a rather odd assumption considering Obama’s own pro Afghanistan escalation rhetoric throughout his campaign and Presidency. Obama even said it was his job to scale down the “uneccessary” war in Iraq to have the proper resources to devote to the “necessary” fights in Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan.

I have been very clear in talking to the American people about what I would do with respect to Afghanistan.

I think we have to have more troops there to bolster the NATO effort. I think we have to show that we are not maintaining permanent bases in Iraq because Secretary Gates, our current Defense secretary, indicated that we are getting resistance from our allies to put more troops into Afghanistan because they continue to believe that we made a blunder in Iraq and I think even this administration acknowledges now that they are hampered now in doing what we need to do in Afghanistan in part because of what’s happened in Iraq.

Now, I always reserve the right for the president — as commander in chief, I will always reserve the right to make sure that we are looking out for American interests. And if al Qaeda is forming a base in Iraq, then we will have to act in a way that secures the American homeland and our interests abroad. So that is true, I think, not just in Iraq, but that&’s true in other places. That’s part of my argument with respect to Pakistan.

via The Democratic Debate in Cleveland – New York Times.

Can you oppose Obama for escalating the war in Afghanistan and not pulling out of Iraq fast enough? Of  course. Can you say you didn’t think an escalation was coming? No. President Obama as a candidate made clear he wasn’t a peacenik. Even in his anti-Iraq war speech as a senator, he distinguished between his idea of a worthwhile war and a mistake.

Good afternoon. Let me begin by saying that although this has been billed as an anti-war rally, I stand before you as someone who is not opposed to war in all circumstances.

The Civil War was one of the bloodiest in history, and yet it was only through the crucible of the sword, the sacrifice of multitudes, that we could begin to perfect this union, and drive the scourge of slavery from our soil. I don’t oppose all wars.

My grandfather signed up for a war the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, fought in Patton’s army. He saw the dead and dying across the fields of Europe; he heard the stories of fellow troops who first entered Auschwitz and Treblinka. He fought in the name of a larger freedom, part of that arsenal of democracy that triumphed over evil, and he did not fight in vain.

I don’t oppose all wars.

After September 11th, after witnessing the carnage and destruction, the dust and the tears, I supported this Administration’s pledge to hunt down and root out those who would slaughter innocents in the name of intolerance, and I would willingly take up arms myself to prevent such a tragedy from happening again.

I don’t oppose all wars. And I know that in this crowd today, there is no shortage of patriots, or of patriotism. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other arm-chair, weekend warriors in this Administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.

What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income?—?to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression.

That’s what I’m opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.

via Barack Obama’s Iraq Speech – Wikisource.

At an anti-war rally and made it explicitly clear he was anti-Iraq war, not anti-war. That was the famous speech in 2002 that endeared him to war skeptics across the nation and was derided as Obama’s only qualification by then candidate Clinton. If one thing Winer can take comfort in, his opposition to ever getting involved in Iraq has been as consistent as his support for Afghanistan.

Hillary Clinton and Mark Penn

Why was Hillary Clinton’s campaign so fraught with back stabbing,disorganization? Well, Burson-Marsteller CEO Mark Penn was chief strategist and pollster, and he was probably worried about his next checks more than he was about President Hillary Clinton becoming reality. Gawker exposes Penn leveraging his Wall Street Journal column on microtrends to parlay new clients for his firm.

Mark Penn’s latest (old, and none too insightful) ‘Microtrend’ column is about “glamping”—glamorous camping. It ran last weekend. By Monday, according to an internal email obtained by Gawker, Burson was already trying to recruit companies from the industry featured in the column as clients. Burson Executive Vice President (and former Bill Clinton speechwriter) Josh Gottheimer urged Burson’s senior staff—including Founding Chairman Harold Burson, US President & CEO Patrick Ford, and others, to use Penn’s column as a tool to approach clients in the camping industry about business.

via Leak: How Mark Penn Converts His Wall Street Journal Column into P.R. Clients – Mark Penn – Gawker.

Get it? Write mini-press release, disguise as op-ed, contact company, ask them if they want to pay for more, collect check for journalism from Wall Street Journal.

Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, warned David Miliband that America would consider cutting security co-operation with the UK if a British court releases information about a former Guantanamo Bay detainee, two judges have been told.

via Hillary Clinton made security help ‘threat’ to David Miliband over Binyam Mohamed case – Telegraph.

At this moment — when 72 percent of the nation supports a public plan option and 14,000 people lose their healthcare every day — the House Blue Dogs and conservative Democratic Senators are doing just about everything they can to cripple real health care reform.

So why does the media keep ceding them the label of “centrist” or “moderate” as if they are the guardians of mainstream values? In a recent profile on reform slayer Max Baucus — Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and creator of his majority Republican “Coalition of the Willing” — Washington Post reporter Dan Eggen refers to Baucus as “a longtime centrist in the Democratic caucus.”

via Katrina vanden Heuvel: Nothing Centrist About Them.

Most Democratic politicians endorsed a Presidential candidate and their platform in 2008. Barack Obama promised a public option with no mandate, Hillary Clinton a single payer system with a mandate. If these so called “Blue Dog” Dems endorsed a candidate they should have expected to get health care done once the sun set January 20th. They knew what they signed on for. The current media narrative is that we are witnessing a healthcare “debate”. We did witness a debate, a full throated two year long guantlet called a Presidential election.  It is a healthcare hijacking with Max Baucus and the “Blue Dogs” being the main henchmen for the inside job funded by donations from  insurance companies and health care providers.

It wasn’t just the President that promised health care reform to the American people. Its time this be brought up over and over again any time a Blue Dog Dem would otherwise cast themselves as a fair minded, principled group of legislators who believe healthcare reform can wait.