Taylor, I thought Hillary’s address was wonderfully impressive, given the degree of confusion, outrage, resentment and disunity in the DNC these past weeks and the fatal body blows Obama’s been suffering before he’s even been officially nominated. It was one of her best performances. But a performance it was, not honest leadership.
I hate to be the one to bring this up, but if the best “criticism” Hillary can manage regarding the economy and other issues is irrelevant thesis, then despite the mindless applause, I’m not sure all this cheerleading is going to help your unproven, incompetent, too-far-left candidate much in November.
Irrespective of any new Constitutional “social justice” Amendments yet to be passed, the government is not responsible for providing its citizens with health care OR health care insurance any more than it is responsible for providing its citizens with homeowner’s insurance, auto insurance, flood insurance, a house, a job, food, clothing, a car, furniture, a television, a phone, electricity, heat, air conditioning or any of the other necessities of life. An honest leader would pursue the cause of skyrocketing health care costs and deal with that. Hillary is not an honest leader, so she chooses to allow those costs to rise and seeks to apply an anti-solution that has the happy benefit (for her) of extending the power of the federal government. With tyrants it is ever thus. And I would add, neither is McCain honest on this score. They’re both aware that the best way to put the entire population of this country directly under the thumb of government is to take over control of their health care. When that happens, you can kiss any real freedom that may still exist in this country good-bye.
Americans who earn their own living WANT to privatize social security because they want to control their own retirement. They do NOT want to leave their retirement funding up to the partisan whims of a Congress that has shown no concern, under any administration, for the long-term viability of the SSI fund.
Using “ERA” issues to attack McCain on the economy is not something a serious person would entertain. The issues are orthogonal. But like Obama, Hillary is not a serious person, she’s just a socialist.
Back here in reality, the economy is doing amazingly well considering the myriad factors that have conspired to drive it into a recession. And despite the relentless mendacity spewed by the media, most of us likely voters are aware of this.
We haven’t seen a recession since November of 2001. You remember, don’t you? That’s the one that started in 2000 with the precipitous drop in GDP – when growth plummeted from 4.8 to 1.9 percent in the final year of Clinton’s administration, thanks to his policy of surplus-through-hypertaxation. It continued that trend into a true recession by April of 2001 (while the government was still operating under the Clinton budget). Thanks to refreshingly enlightened tax policies and economic stimulus when needed, that recession was almost immediately corrected by McCain… oops, I mean President Bush (these days they’re awfully hard to tell apart), and has stayed corrected since. We’ve seen positive economic growth in every quarter of the past seven years.
Even now, we have skyrocketing oil prices facilitated in part by the Pelosi/Reid policies, and which were driven back down by 20% when Bush reversed the executive ban on domestic drilling. We have a suicidal credit banking sector. And we have a Democrat-controlled Congress that has done exactly nothing for two years. With all that – and, oh, maintaining military forces in two foreign countries – the economy is still growing.
Unemployment rates peaked at around 7.3% between 1993 and 2000. Under Bush’s stewardship the peak hasn’t exceeded 6.2%. Even more interestingly, the average unemployment rate – 5.2% – has been identical to the so-called “prosperous” Clinton administration years.
So if Hillary and Obama want to attack McCain on economic policies that were not his own – policies which have been working exceedingly well by any relevant measure – I think a savvy McCain will enjoy having that discussion. Every one of Obama’s other attacks has backfired, big-time. And this would be no different.
And here’s a hint: it’s a safe bet that wannabe-2012-candidate Hillary Clinton is counting on that.
