05.09.08
“Work hard” vs. “Git er done!”
It may be a matter of kicking the Clintons when they’re down, but I think this video points out a flaw in the Clinton rhetoric that the Clintons have never, EVER been called on…until this year. That they got away with it for so long but no longer are is more a function of the party’s “new hotness” in the form of Barack Obama.
Here’s Clinton at a rally, taking on an Obama supporter over Hillary’s health care debacle:
Note the contrasting messages. Bill throws his usual “shame on you” at the individual, and then launches into his boilerplate about how HARD Hillary worked on healthcare. Months and months, meetings upon meetings, thousands of pages of notes and documentation…no doubt, Hillary worked hard. Then when she unveiled her unflushed steaming pile of proposed legislation on her nationwide bus tour, she dealt with sleepless nights, speech upon speech, and that patented Hillary charm (“non-negotiable”).
Yep, she worked hard. No question about that. But … to what end? The voter’s comments at the end sum up the problem. Doesn’t matter how hard you work: it’s what you accomplish. What Hillary accomplished was NOT reform of America’s health care system, but rather an overwhelming, crushing defeat of her non-negotiable, closed-door hubris.
The Clintons never want to talk about results. They want to talk about how hard they worked. Fine; give them a gold star for effort, then put their underachieving carcasses in remedial governance.
Granted, as a conservative, and one who believes that government governs best when it governs least, a hard-working liberal who achieves little is preferable to a liberal who achieves a lot. Jimmy Carter got a whole lot done…and look how the 1970s turned out.