Being a good president means being able to make the correct decisions more often than not. It means having a vision of where you want the country to go, then making sure it's implemented. It means having both experience and a proven track record in dealing with crises. (It also means knowing how to avoid such crises). In short, being a good president means having good judgment. Hillary Clinton has experience, certainly, but it’s mostly experience with making the wrong decisions and displaying incredibly poor judgment.
That judgment was most on display in the first two years of the Clinton Administration. Many of President Clinton’s problems during this time were caused directly by his wife, the so-called, “Smartest woman in the world.” Memories are short-lived, of course, which is why Hillary’s legendary incompetence is failing to get much traction with voters at the moment. But it’s always worthwhile to review her “greatest hits,” many of which served to nearly torpedo her husband’s administration from the beginning.
• Whitewater: A sham real estate transaction drafted by Hillary, which caused the appointment of a special prosecutor, who eventually discovered an intern in the Oval Office.
• Travelgate: “There would be hell to pay if we failed to take swift and decisive action in conformity to the first lady’s wishes,” wrote one Clinton staffer about the firing of some White House workers.
• Filegate: The “bureaucratic snafu” perpetuated by a former bar bouncer who worked for Hillary in the White House. “It’s a done deal, Hillary wants him,” said a White House lawyer when objections were raised about this bouncer’s shady past.
• Cattle Futures: “I was lucky,” said Hillary when it was discovered that she’d made a 10,000% profit in one year. The same woman who called the ‘80s “Reagan’s Decade of Greed” acquired her astronomical profit via preferential treatment and maybe even insider trading.
• Health Care Reform: Here’s where Hillary’s incompetence truly flowered. She nearly single-handedly returned control of both houses of Congress to the Republicans...breaking a record of 40 years of Democratic control of the House. This defeat was so bad that one of Hillary’s fellow liberals told Carl Bernstein, “My view is Hillary Clinton destroyed the Democratic Party.” He also added that Hillary “was a disaster for what we were trying to do in government,” as Bernstein reports in his new Hillary biography, “A Woman in Charge.”
Once noted centrist advisor Dick Morris returned in 1994 to work with Bill Clinton, Hillary’s “co-presidency” role was severely curtailed. It was 1995/96, with Morris’ help, that President Clinton was able to get many of his major policy initiatives passed by Congress. The most successful victory by far was welfare reform, which virtually guaranteed his reelection. Naturally,. Hillary was against welfare reform, calling it, “an attack on children.”
Hillary’s decision-making when in the White House was so bad that even one of the Clinton Whitewater lawyers is on record about it. Attorney Mark Fabiani told Bernstein that several members of the Whitewater legal team came to believe that Hillary’s “instincts are horrible in terms of politics, in terms of managing a crisis like this…We had a joke that all we had to do was ask her, What would you do? And then do the opposite…because almost always her instincts were wrong, backwards…” Fabiani also told Bernstein that Hillary “never surrounded herself with people who would stand up to her, who were of a different mind.” This is the smartest woman in the world?
To see how Hillary's incompetence might play out on the world stage, look no further than Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his management of last summer’s war with Lebanon. Olmert’s job approval ratings are making Bush's look mountainous, especially in view of a government commission appointed to examine just went wrong last year. This commission has been extremely critical of Prime Minister Olmert, calling his decision to go to war without a detailed plan “hasty.” They also criticized him for not “adapting his plan once it became clear that Israel’s actions were not realistic and were not materializing.”
Which sounds exactly like the way Hillary dealt with health care reform - putting together half-baked plans in haste then refusing to even meet with Republicans or health care industry representatives when it became clear her plan was in trouble. “Bill and I didn’t come to Washington to do business as usual and compromise,” she angrily declared when the idea of making a deal was broached.
A health care executive who met with Hillary on her so-called "reform" plan told PBS Frontline, that she “just flunked the test of understanding Washington, understanding reality.” He called her belief that America would let Washington D.C. control 1/7th of the U.S. economy as “naïve.”
Hillary’s failures as a "reformer" go back even farther than her DC debacle. . When she was First Lady of Arkansas her husband appointed her to a committee charged with reforming education.. When asked what qualifications she brought to the committee, she responded, “[Because] I’ve gone to school a large part of my life…and I’ve been involved in classroom activities and visiting with teachers as a volunteer.” All very admirable, but the same could be said of a lot of parents, especially parents who didn't have the benefit of using state troopers as babysitters.
n any event, the results speak for themselves. Before Hillary’s tenure on the education reform committee, Arkansas ranked 49th in test scores. And after her tenure? Arkansas ranked - 49th in test scores! Because Arkansas consistently ranks next to last in so many quality of life categories, their unofficial state motto is said to be, “Thank God for Mississippi.” (Did Bill Clinton's terms as governor make a difference or what!?)
Now it's Senator Hillary Clinton who is asking America to vote for her as president next year, in large part because of her "record of achievement" as First Lady. Clearly she can't tout her Senate record too much, given that she never read the National Intelligence Estimate - the NIE - upon which she based her vote to authorize the Iraq war. She claims to have been “briefed on it.” (One senator who did read the entire report, Bob Graham of Florida, ended up voting against the war because he wasn’t persuaded that Iraq possessed WMDs).
Here we have the most important vote of her legislative career- and yet Hillary couldn't be bothered to do her homework. Perhaps she wanted to get home to cook dinner for Bill. Despite such ineptitude, Washingtonian Magazine has called Hillary, “The Brainiest Senator.” An assessment based on what, precisely?
If Hillary does become president and displays the Olmert-like incompetence, arrogance and sheer sloth that she’s already demonstrated in not just education and health care reform, but in evaluating the threats facing our great nation, the future does not look good for America. In the event of a Hillary Clinton presidency, perhaps we’ll all be forced to say of our country’s declining fortunes, “Thank God for just what, precisely?"
