Clinton challenges Obama to Lincoln-Douglas style debate
April 26, 2008 | Filed Under Election 2008, Opinion and Commentary | No Responses
Hillary Clinton has challenged Barack Obama to a debate, and she has most recently suggested a Lincoln-Douglas style debate. Mercifully, Obama has declined, saying that with 21 debates over the past year, his time would be better spent meeting voters personally, on the ground. I agree. For one thing, we don’t have decent moderators for a real debate, and even though a Lincoln-Douglas style debate would not be moderated, it would still yield what the media, the GOP campaign, and the Clinton campaign (currently synonomous with the GOP campaign) like the most–an opportunity to sift through the audio and the text looking for keywords or phrases that they could distort.
In such a debate, Clinton would have to be Douglas since she possesses none of the qualities of Abraham Lincoln. None. Zero. Unless she has a stovepipe hat somewhere, or a beard. Her values and Lincoln’s could not be farther apart.
“We need a president, especially after the last seven years of George Bush, who doesn’t just make speeches about American values but understands them and lives them and believes them and wants to make sure that they are available for everybody.” – HRC
“just make speeches” indeed. You’d have to be an idiot or as dead as Stephen A. Douglas to have not absorbed the fact that Senator Obama has done and continues to do a mountain more than make speeches, whereas Mrs. Clinton is adroit at engaging in molehill politics. Obama lives his beliefs, which makes him infinitely preferable to someone who changes their beliefs to suit the political climate or win a Senate seat (and for that she also changed where she lived so she could run in New York), or run for President, or cover up a hubby’s sexual indiscretions. He also has more experience in legislative life than Hillary Clinton, so she must think that state legislatures are not as important as managing White House legal defense teams in scandal after scandal or she wouldn’t denigrate his experience.
“American values” : This is the woman who beers it up with the working class after having said to her husband about working class Arkansas voters who did not support him, “Screw them, Bill.” Apart from being elitist, this remark strikes me as dangerous when spoken to a man whose infidelities would suggest that he had probably already done just that.
This is also the woman who has taken Richard Mellon Scaife into her political bed even though Scaife has in the past spent millions of his vast inherited fortune trying to destroy the Democratic Party in general and her husband in particular, and who will no doubt go back to spending millions destroying the party once the Republican convenience of supporting Hillary expires. Can you say “pact with the devil?” Clearly she makes pacts with the devil all of the time or she would have left Bill a long time ago.
This is the woman who loved MoveOn.org when it formed to save her husband from impeachment and when it galvanized the progressive electorate even while the Dems slept at the wheel and took spinelessness and unsteadfastness to new highs. (Or is it lows?) She remains loyal to no one if they might put a bump in her road to the White House, a road that she is so determined is hers and hers alone, that much of the public now believes she is capable of destroying Obama so that she can run again in 2012 if she fails this time around.
To whom has she been loyal over a long period of time (besides Bill)? Mark Penn. Although she fired him for his promotion of the Colombia Free Trade Deal, she has kept him on the campaign as a pollster. Had she really valued the American worker, not to mention integrity in her associations, she would have completely canned Penn for his associations with Cintas, a company that hired Penn’s firm to help them with their campaign to deny workers the right to join a union, or for his firm’s representation of Blackwater, the private security company infamous for its aggression against Iraqi civilians. The only American value in play here seems to be “Stand By Your Man,” even the one who is terribly wrong and terribly corrupt. (Penn’s associations, well beyond the Colombia connection, seem to me to be far more newsworthy than Reverend Wright’s rhetorical flourishes. But Penn is white, and his truly foul bedmates don’t make for good video, so we find the media once again emphasizing the wrong things.)
It seems doubtful to me that she understands American values and lives them, unless, of course, we continue to toss aside the classic ones and count the ones that dominate today–corruption, greed, overweening ambition, self-absorption, hypocrisy, lying, distorting, smearing, racist hints, sound biting, swiftboating, and wearing really expensive pantsuits.
The comparisons of Obama to Lincoln are both legitimate and pervasive. No one has compared Hillary Clinton to a great political, or any other, figure. (Although I do like Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist Thomas Suddes’ dubbing her the “Evita of the Ozarks.”) Lincoln was the one who said “with malice toward none.” Lincoln was the one who stood by his introduction and promotion of the Emancipation Proclamation even though he well knew that it might be political suicide. Lincoln was the one who won the nomination. Douglas was the one who lost the nomination. Go away Mrs. Clinton.
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