Politics: As President Clinton Ends Her 1st Term…
What If We Had Instead Chosen Experience in ’08?
Tomorrow (the 20th) marks the beginning of either Barack Obama‘s final year in office, or his fourth of eight.
Regardless, it is likely the final year of this administration’s arguably best – and most popular – asset. That would be Hillary Clinton. The secretary of state is expected to leave Foggy Bottom at year’s end.
It’s too bad hers won’t be the name on November’s election ballot, because many believe it should be. To many Democrats disappointed and crestfallen by the failure of Obama to live up to their hopes and expectations, Clinton, in retrospect, seems more and more the candidate who should have won the 2008 nomination and, subsequently, the presidency.
Just think: He won the contest between the two, then the presidency, then got saddled with a bad economy, Tea Party Republicans, and sour approval ratings. She won more primary votes, lost the nomination, was rewarded with the consolation prize of State, has reaped the praise of Republican legislators at home and world leaders abroad for her diplomatic achievements, and is now as popular as her boss is not so.
Obama, I feared in 2008, lacked the experience and worldly-wise savoir-faire which I believed Clinton possessed for the job. In view of how his first term has since evolved, I am convinced my initial doubts were proven correct.
What if Hillary’s maturity and experience had prevailed over Barack’s relative youth and charisma in ’08? What might President Hillary Rodham Clinton’s first term have looked like?
A President Hillary, chastised by the humilating defeat of her 1993-94 fight for health care reform in her husband’s first term, wouldn’t have hurried to spend her political capital on passing a health care bill so early in her first term, and might have elected to wisely put it off entirely until her second.
Having served in the Senate longer and nurtured a healthier working relationship with Republican colleagues whose votes she would need for such a bill’s passage, a President Hillary wouldn’t have blundered into the mistakes and miscalculations that Obama incurred with “Obamacare.”
Job creation – and resuscitating the nation’s economy – might have overriden any urge for her to get health care reform done now. And sharing her White House bed each night would have been the perfect presidential adviser on matters of economics – himself, the last president to own a budget surplus and lead the nation through the prosperous ’90s.
President Hillary wouldn’t have balked, as did her boss, at leading the NATO alliance in helping the Libyan opposition knock off Gaddafi. That Obama listened to her and (belatedly) signed off on NATO’s intervention, and that it eventually succeeded in its mission, was one of Hillary’s proudest 2011 moments on the world stage.
No less than Dick Cheney happens to believe things might be different for the country today if Hillary were president. On his book tour last September, he told ABC News that she was “probably the most competent person they’ve got” in the Obama Cabinet and perhaps would have been easier to work with “for some of us who are critics of the president.”
Some aren’t just wishing for Hillary’s ascension to the presidency; they’re publicly calling for it.
Democratic pollsters Pat Caddell and Douglas Schoen, writing in the Wall Street Journal in November, want to draft her for the 2012 nomination. Not only is she “better positioned to win in 2012 than Obama, but she is better positioned to govern if she does.
“Given her strong public support, she has the ability to step above partisan politics, reach out to Republicans, change the dialogue, and break the gridlock in Washington.”
Others suggest making Joe Biden and Hillary swap jobs. He goes to State; she becomes vice president. Bob Woodward first reported in 2010 that such a switch was “on the table.” Former Clinton labor secretary Robert Reich wrote that his “political prediction for 2012” was that they’ll switch.
And last week, Bill Keller wrote in his New York Times column that swapping Biden for the most admired woman in America for the 10th year in a row, with an approval rating (64%) higher than that of any other political figure, is an idea that should be taken seriously.
A Suffolk University poll shows that in the Sunshine State, in a head-to-head matchup with Romney, Obama struggles in the low 40% range. Put Hillary on the ticket and Obama soars to 50%.
The same poll charts Obama-Biden, in Florida alone, losing by 5 points to a non-specific GOP nominee-Marco Rubio ticket. But an Obama-Hillary ticket whips that non-specific GOP nominee-Marco Rubio ticket by 3 points. (Whipping Rubio’s ass and seriously deflating whatever presidential aspirations he harbors is an added bonus.)
Remarked one pollster: “In Florida, Marco Rubio is superman, but Hillary Clinton is the kryptonite.”
Quoted in a Newsweek profile of his wife last year, Bill Clinton joked that Hillary now covets the title of grandmother more than that of commander-in-chief. Still the speculation by others continues. 2016?
“WHY DOES ART COST SO EFFING MUCH?”
was the title of a six-page Newsweek story (Dec. 12 issue) whose focus was on the art lovers who came to town to drop lucre during Art Basel.
“A pile of stools for $575,000. A cabinet full of surgical intruments for a cool $2.5 million,” writes Blake Gopnik. “The global economy’s in a tailspin, but among the world’s elite collectors, works are selling for record places. Why is art so damned expensive?”
One reason: scamming. Gopnik refers to a veteran New York dealer who speaks of “the ‘scuzzy’ people who keep the Warhol market hot by manipulating his auctions.”
Scuzzy people? We got more than plenty in Miami.
Some of these scuzzy people prefer to pay more for art than makes sense. For them, says the NY dealer, “the price paid for a work is the trophy itself.”
Gopnik adds: “If giant fairs like Miami Basel are lousy places to contemplate art – and they are – they continue to flourish because they are fabulous places for shopping” for it.
In the art market, collectors “are buying the pleasure of shopping as much as the art they get out of it.” One art adviser he quotes describes a collector as “like a diseased human being. These people love to buy, and they love to buy art.”
When the wealthy are dropping half a mil on old stools and three times that for some blue paint on a white canvas, the president’s suggestion that it’s time the rich shoulder a larger tax burden seems a damn good one and looking better all the time.
A CLASS ACT
That was GOP presidential wannabee Jon Huntsman, who dropped out this week. He brought a woefully-scarce tone of civility to this race plus an erudition on the issues that, for this observer, made most of the others, from Paul to Perry to Bachmann to Cane, seem like Mickey Mouse Club ninnies and half-wits, way, way out of their league.
He was too good for this modern GOP, a party doped up on too much Tea Party lunacy and reich-wing insistence that Obama is nothing but a foreign-born socialist, taxes are all bad, government is no good, and the medicine to what ails us is an “ignorance is bliss” platform of slash-and-burn economics that would surely hasten – if the voters stupidly vote them in this November – The Great Depression 2 (or its cinematic equivalent, Titanic 2: Capt. “Mitt Hoover” Steers the Ship of State Straight Into an Iceberg.)
There was a perfectly good reason Team Obama dreaded a fall match vs. Obama’s ex-ambassador to China: Huntsman was the sanest and most competent of the batch. Still is.
I (WISH I) BOUGHT A ZOO
In a metropolis teaming with too many people, too many cars, too much noise, and too much hustle-and-bustle and hurry-scurry, it’s nice to know there are pastoral and idyllic crooks and crevices in our region from which to escape the madding crowds.
Invited to visit two of those crooks and crevices last week, I rediscovered the wildlife, exhibits, and scenery of Zoo Miami, which I hadn’t seen in eight years, and the serenity of Homestead’s Camp Owaissa Bauer, which I’d never visited before.
Of the zoo, there were parts familiar and other parts refreshingly new. I can report to you that the Oasis Grille, under renovation, is on its way to completion and will reopen to zoo patrons in a few months.
I saw lions, and tigers, and bears (oh, my!), plus elephants, and antelope, and lots of birds. What a welcome respite they were from the daily monotony we encounter of humans, humans, and nothing but humans (some of the more obnoxious of that species I wouldn’t mind feeding to the lions, tigers, and bears).
Camp OB is nestled on 110 rustic acres surrounded by rural farm country. Scouts pitch tents here. Church groups host retreats here. Family reunions, field trips, and athletic camps are held here. Guests will even be treated to a gen-u-ine hay ride, as I was.
Immense thanks to my two tour guides, Terry Mallo, Zoo Miami’s special events manager, and Pamela Rose, park and recreation manager for Camp OB, for treating me to an educational, enjoyable day as well as for their roles in stewarding two of our county’s natural treasures.
For more information about these two local natural assets, go to zoomiami.org and miamidade.gov/parks/parks/owaissa_bauer_camp.asp.
THE ASS-WIPE TROPHY
Speaking of wildlife, the Burmese python is one species that is unwelcome in these parts. Devouring practically anything and everything that moves, crawls, and walks in its path, the slithering encroacher has become a pernicious threat to other animal populations, particularly those of the Everglades.
Still, there are the snakes’ fans. The U.S. Association of Reptile Keepers hired a lobbying firm to try to convince federal lawmakers to oppose a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed ban on them.
Decrying “excessive and over zealous regulation,” USARK ridiculously warned that the ban would “put approximately 1 million Americans in jeopardy of becoming felons, destroy thousands of jobs, and threaten the annual $1.4 billion national and international trade” in these reptiles.
For their stupid opposition to the ban, which went into effect this week, these morons get the first roll of t.p. of 2012. (Recall what I wrote earlier about wishing I could feed some of our species to certain other species?)
