Bill Clinton deserves the title of "first black American president" more than Obama does

L. Douglas Wilder, governor of Virginia from 1990 to 1994, was the nation’s first elected African-American governor. His piece at Politico yesterday compares Bill Clinton’s presidency to Obama’s in terms of benefits for blacks and concludes that under Clinton, blacks fared much better.

That conclusion unavoidably reminds us of the Obama campaign’s wildly false accusations of racism against Bill and Hillary Clinton in the 08 primary.  Despite the painful irony Wilder’s piece evokes, however, it’s well worth the read.

Referencing Toni Morrison’s comment that Clinton was "America’s first black president," Wilder writes:

Obama was elected in a flourish of promise that many in the African-American community believed would help not only to symbolize African-American progress since the Civil War and Civil Rights Acts but that his presidency would result in doors opening in the halls of power as had never been seen before by black America.

Has that happened? I am forced to say, “No” — especially when comparing Morrison’s metaphorical first black president to the actual first black president.

Think back on a small slice of merely the upper levels of the Clinton administration, and remember how many Cabinet agencies the Arkansan had named African-Americans to lead: Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy, Labor Secretary Alexis Herman, Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary, Transportation Secretary Rodney Slater, Veterans Affairs Secretary Jesse Brown, Army Secretary Togo West, who succeeded Brown at Veteran Affairs, Office and Management and Budget Director Franklin Raines and Director of National Drug Control Policy Lee Brown. Clinton also regularly cited Vernon Jordan as a respected adviser and strategist.

Clinton may not have been the nation’s first black president — but he did make appointments like he was. Obama would do well to look a little closer at the Clinton template.

Wilder continues:

By birth and life experience, Clinton cannot lay claim to the title of first black president — as Morrison knighted him. But Obama needs to work harder to make it less obvious that Clinton, in governing deed, actually deserves it more that the 44th president does.

Read the entire article here:

Arianna Huffington favorably cites a Clinton??!

Arianna Huffington’s post titled “Arizona Shootings: Our Moment of Silence Needs to Be Followed by More Than Just Lowered Voices” would be more credible if one didn’t recall the viciousness of her blog’s attacks on Hillary Clinton during and after the 08 primary, not to mention the denigration of Bill Clinton and his administration.

The Huffington Post egregiously amplified every insane charge from the Left targeting Hillary, including repeated slanderous accusations of racism. Huffpo, the vanguard of the Left, also eagerly published posts suggesting that the first viable woman presidential candidate in American history hoped for the assassination of Barack Obama, her leading opponent in the Democratic primary.

Needless to say, Arianna and company went on the attack again when Hillary was appointed secretary of state.

One can only hope that Arianna’s words in today’s post are sincere:

This is not a call for passionate debate to come to a halt. But there is a huge difference between passionately disagreeing with your opponents and crudely demonizing them, between considering them as adversaries to be engaged and treating them as enemies to be targeted.

In a remarkable turnaround from 08, Arianna encourages President Obama to follow in the footsteps of former President Clinton:

In the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, President Clinton made a number of impassioned calls for taking a stand against reckless speech and behavior. "When there is talk of hatred," he said at a prayer service four days after the attack, "let us stand up and talk against it. When there is talk of violence, let us stand up and talk against it. In the face of death, let us honor life. As St. Paul admonished us, Let us 'not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.'"

I'd love to see President Obama use this moment to call on the country to find ways to "overcome evil with good." Americans, he said in a 2006 speech, "want a sense of purpose, a narrative arc to their lives." That purpose should be found in the shared national objective of rebuilding our communities and our connection to each other through everyday acts of compassion, generosity, and service.

I believe it’s possible for human beings to wake up and acknowledge their own culpability in the perpetuation of evil in society. Here’s hoping for the redemption of Arianna and the Huffington Post.

The Much-Needed Bill Moyers’ Touch on Health Care Reform

In July 2006, the late Molly Ivins wrote a column promoting Bill Moyers for president. Ivins led off with these words:

Dear desperate Democrats:

Here’s what we do. We run Bill Moyers for president. I am serious as a stroke about this. It’s simple, cheap, and effective, and it will move the entire spectrum of political discussion in this country. Moyers is the only public figure who can take the entire discussion and shove it toward moral clarity just by being there.

Ivins died of breast cancer in January 2007 but I thought of her today when I read this piece on health care reform by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship. Like many Americans, I’ve been struggling to follow the progress of health care reform this time around as reported by a media still doing its best to damn Hillary Clinton and prop up Barack Obama. Barely mentioned by either the old or new media are the travesties perpetrated by the insurance and pharmaceutical companies continuously in league with the Republican Party from the 90s until today when they’ve managed to get their way with Democratic Party leadership.

Sure enough it's taken Moyers’ touch to bring moral clarity to the topic. First, he and co-author Winship nail the Repubs:

The Republican strategy is almost identical to the way they turned health care into Waterloo for Bill and Hillary Clinton in 1993. Back then, one of their chief propagandists, William Kristol, urged his party to block any health care plan for fear that Democrats would be seen as "the generous protector of middle class interests." Now he's telling the GOP to "go for the kill... throw the kitchen sink... drive a stake through its heart... We need to start over."

Next, our intrepid authors go after corporate interests:

As the Republicans fired away, big business stepped up the attack, too, their lobbying and advertising guns blazing. The Chamber of Commerce, for one, announced a major campaign of rallies and print and Internet ads to crush the White House plan for a competitive public option allowing consumers to choose between a government plan and private health insurance. In key states where members of Congress remain on the fence, the airwaves are vibrating with television commercials aimed at shifting hearts and minds away from any change that might threaten profits.

Obama does not escape criticism:

President Obama rejected the Republicans' Waterloo metaphor and mounted a massive media counteroffensive of his own. But the President has already run into booby traps of his own making and minefields laid by members of his own party, exacerbated when the Congressional Budget Office reported that reform plans, instead of controlling costs, would send the national debt further into the stratosphere.

Meanwhile, supporters who want to scrap the present system for fundamental change are staring glumly though the fog of war at a battlefield in total disarray. They fear that in the White House's desire to get a bill -- any bill -- passed by Congress, it will have been so compromised, so bent to favor the big interests, that it will be less Waterloo than water down, a steady diluting of the change they had hoped for and that America needs.

And here’s a depressing word or two regarding the successes of the pharmaceutical industry (Remember when candidate Obama pledged to rid Washington of lobbyists?):

According to the Associated Press, the drug industry's trade group PhRMA (the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America) and the drug company Pfizer "reported spending more money than other health care organizations on lobbying in the second quarter of this year" -- $6.2 million from PhRMA, $5.6 million from Pfizer.

"Including its latest report, PhRMA has now spent $13.1 million lobbying so far this year. Pfizer has reported $11.7 million in lobbying expenses for 2009."

There’s more:

This is part of the reason, as Alicia Mundy and Laura Meckler recently wrote in The Wall Street Journal, that "the pharmaceuticals industry, which President Barack Obama promised to 'take on' during his campaign, is winning most of what it wants in the health-care overhaul."

Their story describes "a string of victories" plucked from the Senate Finance Committee by drug company lobbyists, including no cost-cutting steps, no cheaper drugs to be allowed across the border from Canada, and no direct Federal government negotiations with the pharmaceutical companies to lower Medicare drug prices.

And that's not all. The Senate Health Committee is giving the biotech industry monopoly protection against competition from generic drugs for 12 years after they go on the market.

And now for the return of the fabled Harry and Louise. Moyers and Winship conclude:

No wonder the cost of reform keeps going up and up and up. Could it be that Harry and Louise are happier because, this time, they're in on the deal?

Back in 2006, Molly Ivins suggested to her readers that we write to Moyers and let him know what we thought of her idea to enter his name in the Democratic primary. I took her up on it and urged him to run. As I recall, I received a thoughtful card in response from Moyers. Too bad he declined. Seriously.

Obama Gets the Picture: It Takes Experience to Make Change Happen

Update: The rumor of Hillary Clinton’s possible appointment as Secretary of State is still out there; her meeting with Obama to discuss her role in his administration has been confirmed.

Politico’s Ben Smith and Carrie Budoff Brown report this morning the Obama transition looks increasingly like the former Clinton Administration:

“Thirty-one of the 47 people so far named to transition or staff posts have ties to the Clinton Administration, including all but one of the members of his 12-person Transition Advisory Board and both of his White House staff choices.

“Most of those appointees weren't West Wing heavy-hitters, but lower-profile policy hands such as former Deputy Secretary of Defense John White and former State Department official Wendy Sherman. They include former deputies to National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, Defense Secretary William Perry, and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and some currently work at consultancies run by those Clinton administration principals.

“Others are old Obama allies who also have Clinton ties, like Michael Froman, a transition adviser who was Obama's classmate at Harvard Law School and served as Robert Rubin's chief of staff at the Clinton Treasury Department, and Christopher Edley, who taught Obama at Harvard and also served Clinton, and who is married to a former Clinton deputy chief of staff.

‘“This is a good way to try to be helpful without giving up my new life at Berkeley,’ said Edley, who is now dean of the law school at the University of California at Berkeley, in an email.

“The highest-ranking member of the group with deep ties to both Clinton and Obama is Emanuel, a Chicagoan who is very close to Obama and his chief strategist, David Axelrod.

“Though the transition is still young, former Clintonites say they feel a change in the atmosphere.

“‘It's heartening to see that that was just primary rhetoric,’ said a former Clinton aide of Obama's criticism of Clinton's administration.”’

One might also ask if Obama’s praise of the Reagan Administration was just campaign rhetoric.

Read more.

Obama Reaches for Ronald Reagan’s Mantle

Photo credits: Composite image by Politico.com

It was customary during the Democratic primary for the Obama campaign to dismiss the achievements of the Clinton Administration and smear Bill and Hillary Clinton with whatever false charges were handy; for example, a favorite ploy was labeling the Clintons as racists.

But the real kicker by BO and his followers has been their repeatedly expressed admiration for Ronald Reagan, aka “the Great Communicator.” At Politico this morning, July 19, 2008, David Paul Kuhn reminds readers of how Obama keeps returning to Reagan:

“It could have been a coincidence when Barack Obama gave a major policy speech last week at a building named after Ronald Reagan. But it comes from the same campaign that until yesterday had pushed to hold a major foreign policy address at the Brandenburg Gate, where Ronald Reagan in 1987 famously demanded of his Soviet counterpart, ‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’

“During his bid for the presidency, Obama has repeatedly praised the political gifts of Reagan, the modern president most revered by Republicans, and whose policies are still held in contempt by many leading liberals.

“A year ago Obama compared Reagan favorably to President Bush in a primary debate while defending his pledge to meet directly with the leaders of hostile nations without preconditions. ‘Ronald Reagan called [Russia] an evil empire,’ said Obama, but he also ‘spoke to the Soviet Union.’

“In January, Obama came under fire from within his party after casting himself as an emotive heir to Reagan. ‘Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America,’ Obama told a Nevada newspaper in January, noting that Reagan ‘tapped into what people were already feeling, which is we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.’

“David Bonior, then the campaign manager for John Edwards, charged that Obama was ‘wrong, frightfully so, in using Ronald Reagan as an example of voters reaching for change. The breadth of change Ronald Reagan brought was crippling for millions of Americans.”’

Read More.

Nailing Obama’s Slurs Against the Clinton Administration

Paul Krugman has noticed that Barack Obama, with his “bitter” talk, has been clinging to a stereotype made popular by Thomas Frank’s theory spelled out in his 2004 book, “What’s the Matter with Kansas.”

Here’s the deal: Frank’s theory about the typical Kansan has recently been turned on its head, leaving Obama with a false premise on his hands.

But I’ll let Krugman explain:

“Mr. Obama’s comments combined assertions about economics, sociology and voting behavior. In each case, his assertion was mostly if not entirely wrong.

“Start with the economics. Mr. Obama: ‘You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration.’”

Here’s where Krugman nails Obama for his casual slurs against the Clinton Administration:

“There are, indeed, towns where the mill closed during the 1980s and nothing has replaced it. But the suggestion that the American heartland suffered equally during the Clinton and Bush years is deeply misleading.

“In fact, the Clinton years were very good for working Americans in the Midwest, where real median household income soared before crashing after 2000. (You can see the numbers at my blog, krugman.blogs.nytimes.com.)

“We can argue about how much credit Bill Clinton deserves for that boom. But if I were a Democratic Party elder, I’d urge Mr. Obama to stop blurring the distinction between Clinton-era prosperity and Bush-era economic distress.”

Krugman then explains the fallacy in Obama’s sociological assumptions:

“Next, the sociology: ‘And it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.’

“The crucial word here isn’t ‘bitter,’ it’s ‘cling.’ Does economic hardship drive people to seek solace in firearms, God and xenophobia?

“It’s true that people in poor states are more likely to attend church regularly than residents of rich states. This might seem to indicate that faith is indeed a response to economic adversity.

“But this result largely reflects the fact that southern states are both church-going and poor; some poor states outside the South, like Maine and Montana, are actually less religious than Connecticut. Furthermore, within poor states, people with low incomes are actually less likely to attend church than those with high incomes. (The correlation runs the opposite way in rich states.)”

“Over all, none of this suggests that people turn to God out of economic frustration.”


“Finally, Mr. Obama, in later clarifying remarks, declared that the people he’s talking about ‘don’t vote on economic issues,’ and are motivated instead by things like guns and gay marriage.

“That’s a political theory made famous by Thomas Frank’s ‘What’s the Matter With Kansas?’ According to this theory, ‘values’ issues lead working-class Americans to act against their own interests by voting Republican. Mr. Obama seemed to suggest that’s also why they support Hillary Clinton.

“I was impressed by Mr. Frank’s book when it came out. But my Princeton colleague Larry Bartels, who had an Op-Ed in The Times on Thursday, convinced me that Mr. Frank was mostly wrong.

“In his Op-Ed, Mr. Bartels cited data showing that small-town, working-class Americans are actually less likely than affluent metropolitan residents to vote on the basis of religion and social values. Nor have working-class voters trended Republican over time; on the contrary, Democrats do better with these voters now than they did in the 1960s.”

To read Krugman’s op-ed in its entirety, go here.