Proving A Negative
Mar 20th, 2008 at 5:32 am by Susie
Hillary Clinton was constantly attacked by the media, other Democrats and the GOP for playing too large a role in her husband’s administration.
Now that same media is falling all over itself to prove she didn’t. Funny, that.
And by the way, anyone who read Bill Clinton’s biography knows exactly how much she influenced him. And anyone with half a brain realizes that no matter what she thought, her public role was to advance her husband’s policies.
So no, there’s no meaningful contradiction between Clinton advocating for her own NAFTA position in private and pushing her husband’s in public.
It’s like when I was on an editorial board - you advocate strongly for your point of view in the board meeting, but then the board comes to a consensus and you have to accept it. And yes, when it was my turn, I had to write editorials with which I completely disagreed.
I did a good job. It’s what I agreed to do.
UPDATE: Molly shows us how enlightening it is to track marital relationships via memo.
You have a very thought provoking site and I generally agree with what you are saying. However, I can not understand the logic of writing in support of a groupthink decision about something with which you disagree. This is either very cynical or you truly believe that it is the right thing to do. Either way it is wrong and I am beginning to see that Truth is a marginally unimportant factor with the vast majority of Americans.
Intuitively, I knew this, but after the American Pravda service made such a stink about a pastor’s so-called unamericanisms (almost all of which are historically accurate) I have to hang my head in shame. I do not see this country as “exceptional” in any positive way and for the last 100 plus years we have been duped into believing that this nation is a beacon of and caretaker of The Enlightenment’s principles of liberal government. Crap…
On an editorial board, you have to split the workload. Ideally, you assign an editorial to someone who advocates that position, but it’s not always practical. When you’re working as a member of a team, you have to support the team. If a lineman doesn’t like the play the quarterback calls, he still has to run the play.
strong evidence is mounting that she was VERY PRO-NAFTA and her pal Gergen was falt-out lying when he said she was against it while campaigning in OH. Facts don’t lie but I am sure the spin will pick up to counter them. She was not just shilling for her husband while “personally opposing nafta”…
Gergen and his memory problems: http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2008/3/20/141238/260
Please provide a list of those “other democrats” who constantly attacked Hillary during her husband’s administration. Include the actual quotes, and the dates on which they were made, if not too much trouble. I’d like to read them.
Actually, Hillary Clinton wasn’t “constantly attacked by the media, other Democrats and the GOP for playing too large a role in her husband’s administration.”
During the campaign the idea that by electing for Bill Clinton, people also be electing his wife, who wasn’t actually on the ballot, was criticized. Then, of course, when Hillary Clinton spearheaded the health care initiative she was heavily criticized. And then when that failed miserably she was also heavily criticized. But that happened in 1993. Then the administration decided it would abandon the co-presidency idea, Hillary Clinton was largely ignored, until her husband’s inability to keep it zipped and the right-wing freakout over same became a national embarrassment.
And now Clinton would like everyone to believe that she was heavily involved in every important policy decision of the Clinton administration, except, of course, for the ones that aren’t particularly popular amongst Democratic primary voters. And some people are pointing out that her role may have been quite as impressive as she would like us to believe. And that’s about the size of it.
So instead of “Proving a Negative”, a better title would be “Asserting a Bunch of Nonsense”.