Swiftboating
Mar 14th, 2008 at 3:52 pm by Susie
You remember what swiftboating is, right?
That’s why I found this so interesting. Compare and contrast the things said by the exact same people back when the Clinton administration was in office - and then after those people endorsed Barack Obama. Here’s a sample:
If we are to take the definition of “swiftboating” as diminishing the important accomplishments of one’s life through falsehoods, and making that person seem like a liar for talking proudly of these accomplishments and turning strengths into liabilities, then we have a new round of it going on right now for another candidate: Hillary Clinton. True, one case dealt with combat bravery, and this case deals with diplomatic and legislative bravery, but the attacks are quite reminiscent.
Lets take a quick look at these claims and counter-claims, shall we?
SCHIP
Addressing Iowa voters in November, Clinton said, “in 1997, I joined forces with members of Congress and we passed the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.” Clinton regularly cites the number of children in each state who are covered by the program, and mothers of sick children have appeared at Clinton campaign rallies to thank her.
This has been familiar to anyone who has regularly seen the debates of her campaign speeches. However, doubt is now being cast on her role. Here’s Orrin Hatch:
“The White House wasn’t for it. We really roughed them up” in trying to get it approved over the Clinton administration’s objections, Hatch said in an interview. “She may have done some advocacy [privately] over at the White House, but I’m not aware of it.”
“I do like her,” Hatch said of Hillary Clinton. “We all care about children. But does she deserve credit for SCHIP? No - Teddy does, but she doesn’t.”
Ted Kennedy:
Asked whether Clinton was exaggerating her role in creating SCHIP, Kennedy, stopped in the hallway as he was entering the chamber to vote, half-shrugged.
“Facts are stubborn things,” he said, declining to criticize Clinton directly. “I think we ought to stay with the facts.”
I agree with Ted…and so does Ted:
“The children’s health program wouldn’t be in existence today if we didn’t have Hillary pushing for it from the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue,” Kennedy told The Associated Press.
President Clinton signed the bill in August 1997.
While Kennedy is widely viewed as the driving force behind the program, by all accounts the former first lady’s pressure was crucial.
“She wasn’t a legislator, she didn’t write the law, and she wasn’t the president, so she didn’t make the decisions,” says Nick Littlefield, then a senior health adviser to Kennedy. “But we relied on her, worked with her and she was pivotal in encouraging the White House to do it.”
NORTHERN IRELAND
Greg Craig, Washington attorney and a senior adviser to the Barack Obama campaign, and former Clinton administration official:
It’s a little bit presumptuous for the first lady, who would meet people and support people to take credit away from the Irish themselves who did it…
The evidence should be accurate. And my point is that Senator Clinton and her supporters have in serious ways overstated, if not grossly exaggerated, the nature of her experience.
Pretty damning, huh? Not really. There are a lot of important testimonials I could put here, but this is a good one:
Statement from John Hume, former MP, MEP, founder of the SDLP and an architect of the Good Friday Agreement. He is the only person to win the Nobel Prize for Peace, the Ghandi Peace Award and the Martin Luther King Peace Prize:
“I am quite surprised that anyone would suggest that Hillary Clinton did not perform important foreign policy work as First Lady. I can state from firsthand experience that she played a positive role for over a decade in helping to bring peace to Northern Ireland.
She visited Northern Ireland, met with very many people and gave very decisive support to the peace process. There is no doubt that the people of Northern Ireland think very positively of Hillary Clinton’s support for our peace process, due to her visits to Northern Ireland and her meetings with so many people. In private she made countless calls and contacts, speaking to leaders and opinion makers on all sides, urging them to keep moving forward.
Anyone criticizing her foreign policy involvement should look at her very active and positive approach to Northern Ireland and speak with the people of Northern Ireland who have the highest regard for her and are very grateful for her very active support for our peace process.”
Funny, but William Trimble (former First Minister of Northern Ireland wh shared the Nobel Peace Prize) called Hillary’s claim “a wee bit silly…I don’t know there was much she did apart from accompanying Bill (Clinton) going around… being a cheerleader for something is slightly different from being a principal player.”
Peter King, an Ulster Unionist Party negotiator at the Good Friday talks in 1998, insisted “Hillary Clinton was totally invisible at the actual negotiations…As far as I am concerned, Mrs Clinton was as relevant to peace in Northern Ireland as Tony Blair’s wife or the ex-wife of Bertie Ahern [the Irish prime minister].”
“In fact, both Both Unionist and Nationalist negotiators told [the Telegraph] that while Mrs Clinton’s work with women’s groups was positive her overall role was peripheral and she played no part in the grueling negotiations that took years.”
- The Telegraph (UK)
Both George Mitchell, who chaired the Northern Ireland talks, and Madeline Albright, then Secretary of State, have written and spoken extensively on the negotiations, and hardly mentioned Mrs. Clinton. Mitchell has said that Clinton “was not involved directly” in the negotiations.
‘Chris Thornton, a political reporter for the Belfast Telegraph, said that Hillary Clinton’s visits to northern Ireland contributed to the “mood music” that made an eventual settlement possible, but were hardly key to reaching an agreement. “Would we have reached a settlement without that kind of stuff? Yes. Would we have got one without the intervention of Bill Clinton and George Mitchell? No.”‘
- Washington Post
The Post also pointed out that Hillary is making much more of her role in Northern Ireland now than she did in her own memoir, “Living History.” She now tells a story that gets more and more dramatic with each stump speech about how she brought Protestant and Catholic women together “for the first time” at Belfast City Hall. She claimed that they were enemies “who saw each other not as caricatures or stereotypes, but as human beings who actually had common experiences as mothers and wives and people.”
But, in her memoir, the story is set in an entirely different location, a fish restaurant, the women weren’t enemies but peace activists, and she herself wrote that she was only a supporting witness - not the key player she now claims to have been.
As for SCHIP:
“It was a bipartisan bill. I don’t remember the role of the White House,” said Representative Henry Waxman, (D-CA) …who was the chief Democrat on the Energy and Commerce Committee, which deals with health matters. “It did not originate at the White House.”
John McDonough, former Democratic politician and now executive director of Health Care for All, an advocacy group said, “I don’t recall any signs of Mrs. Clinton’s engagement…I’m sure she was behind the scenes, engaged in lobbying, but it is demonstrably not the case” that she was driving the effort, he said.
If Senator Clinton was so passionate about SCHIP, why did she skip the critical vote last November 1 to extend SCHIP?
Its clear that Hillary played a part in history - as has every First Lady - but that now, desperate to build a case for her “experience” she is “puffing” her resume rather dramatically.
As Chris Rock pointed out, “I’ve been a comedian for 20 years. I’ve been married for 10 years, but that doesn’t make my wife funny.”
Ya but ya but yabut.
With Clinton’s experience being denigrated on both the right and the left, just stating the facts don’t do it.
You get so many “what abouts” it makes your head spin.
Clinton’s time as first lady was just sitting in the same room no matter what the record is because she “didn’t hold elective office”, “Didn’t draft legislation”, or what have you. Her pre-1992 experience doesn’t count either because, well just because. Time in the senate doesn’t count either.
If we were just getting this stuff from the right there’d be no problem. It’s the combination from both sides that’s drowning us.
Hi Susie. This is a really well-written defense of HRC; good job. (And I write this as an Obama supporter - shhhh.)
Blue Sun, you do know the right wing in Ireland hated the Clintons, right? And that the Telegraph is an extremely right-wing paper? (I’m surprised they didn’t dig up Ian Paisley’s grave and ask him.)
http://susiemadrak.com/2008/03/11/20/56/hillary-in-ireland/
The term swiftboarding orginated with John Kerry where there were 2 stories, 6 people agreed with the Kerry version which reminded me of a cross between Washington crossing the Delaware and The PT 109 story, which wasn’t exactly true either, and 250 people who were there who had an eintrely different version, If I have a chioice of believeing 6 people or 250, I’ll go with the 250.
John Kerry is the only person I know who carried more film into battle then he did ammunition.
Oh come on people. She was not an elected official at that time so anything said by her would only be an opinion. To say she single handedly brought some solution in any country is absurd.
And if the claim was “single handedly brought some solution” I suppose there would be some point to what you write, demeur. (I remember then “straw man” went viral in the Obama Fan Base over at the 527 that used to be Daily Kos. Oh, the humanity!)