The Hillary Clinton Question

I'm not ready to go negative on Hillary Clinton but she has some thinking and explaining to do whether she likes it or not. This is not 1992; we've had eight controversial years from the Clintons where the negativity came primarily from the far right but any number of things were not handled well by the Clintons; and we've had six years of a failed presidency under George W. Bush that have been like nothing any of us have ever seen. Things have changed in fourteen years and Hillary needs to understand it.

I looked on Hillary Clinton's news section on her site tonight and I'm not comfortable by what I see here, here and here. A lot of us have been cutting Hillary Clinton some slack since some negative news started appearing in the last six weeks about other Democrats and seemed the kind of thing that comes from the right but, posting some of these things on her campaign website give cause to be concerned. Hillary has the potential of being a fine president but not if she's keeps up some of the negativity and resistance to being upfront with voters.

I'm willing to give Hillary the benefit of the doubt because some of the things going on are outside the kind of things I usually follow and I feel I don't know all the details yet. Here's a post by Arianna Huffington to think about:

In his interview with Maureen Dowd, which is filling up email inboxes all around DC and Hollywood, David Geffen made this prediction about the Hillary Clinton campaign (which Dowd dubbed "Clinton Inc"): "That machine is going to be very unpleasant and unattractive and effective."

It didn't take long for Clinton Inc to prove him right. Not long after Dowd's column hit the streets, "that machine" whirred into high gear with Clinton Communications director Howard Wolfson firing off a press release condemning Geffen and urging Obama to denounce him:

While Senator Obama was denouncing slash and burn politics yesterday, his campaign's finance chair was viciously and personally attacking Senator Clinton and her husband.

If Senator Obama is indeed sincere about his repeated claims to change the tone of our politics, he should immediately denounce these remarks, remove Mr. Geffen from his campaign and return his money.

The thing is, Geffen is not Obama's "finance chair" nor his "principal fundraiser" as Wolfson also claims.

Was the assertion that Mr. Geffen was Barack Obama's campaign finance chair a deliberate fib or just a mistake? Either way, it doesn't put Hillary in a good light.

Hillary Clinton's refusal to explain her vote is also troubling. In the background, hanging over her shoulder whether she likes it or not is Bill Clinton. Now I voted twice for Bill Clinton and was glad to do so. Among other things, Clinton did a terrific job with the economy and the creation of jobs after a number of years of stagnant job growth. And I appreciate what our former president did to Chris Wallace on Fox News and I appreciate what our former president is doing with his many worthwhile ventures these days. But.... While I have been concerned with the Bush administration's profound incompetence and lies and while I spent a lot of time examining how we got into Iraq, Clinton and some of his advisers have an odd way of popping up in the background.

I remember reading an article before the war in Iraq where Bill Clinton apparently urged Tony Blair to be patient with George W. Bush; nothing was stated explicitly about Bill Clinton's position but it seemed to suggest that perhaps our former president favored the invasion of Iraq, albeit by way of the UN and with multilateral support. Some of President Clinton's former advisers were also very hawkish about Iraq. None were more hawkish than James Woolsey, the CIA director under Clinton, and one of the few neoconservative Democrats. With all due respect to Hillary Clinton, she does have some explaining to do if only to put any number of her supporters at ease about her position on foreign policy and Iraq and how she arrives at her decisions. I don't insist on anything elaborate but I'm far from being satisfied by what she has said so far. And frankly, it feels like someone has something she's trying to avoid. I hope not.

One last thing. Hillary Clinton has been selling herself as a moderate Democrat and I say that's just fine, as long it's the kind of moderate Democrat we expect of Jack Murtha or Diane Feinstein or Mark Warner or Jim Webb or any number of others. What we do not need is a Democrat, or rather former Democrat, like Joe Lieberman. Lieberman represents business as usual in Washington. Our country needs something far better than that at the moment.