Common Sense Political Thought

Our 42nd President said of his estranged wife:

She’s got the right vision, big plans and a proven ability to change lives for the better. Experience and change are only opposed in values if you’re so experienced you don’t have any energy left and you can’t cut it, or if your experience is in fighting change,” he said. “But if you know how to do things, and you prove it over a long time that you can make change in other people’s lives, I think that is a pretty strong recommendation.

Hat tip to DRJ, of Patterico’s Pontifications!

I’d say that’s a pretty good case for voting for Mitt Romney (who actually has done things) and a very strong case not to vote for Senatrix Clinton.

The lovely Mrs Clinton was given one, and only one, executive responsibility job since she married Bill Clinton, the makeover of our health care system. She and her team labored for months, in a secrecy of which Vice President Cheney could only dream, and produced a piece of legislation that was so bad that not one single section of it was passed by one single committee or subcommittee of the 103rd Congress, a Congress which had greater Democratic majorities in both Houses than any of the Republican majorities in the six subsequent Congresses.¹

As an attorney, she tried few cases and produced no big results; her greatest accomplishment for the Rose Law Form was to bring in clients based on her husband’s position as governor of Arkansas, and lose a bunch of billing records. As a senator, she has no signature legislation and even as part of the majority now, she’s what a European would call a back-bencher. The “experience” that former President Clinton would like to attach to her political résumé is actually his experience; perhaps he is saying that Mrs Clinton’s presidency, should we be so unfortunate as to have such come about, would be in the Lurleen Wallace² mold.

There is simply no evidence that she “know(s) how to do things,” save in doing things wrong. Her experience is not one of success, but one of failure.

And Sister Toldjah has the story of Mrs Clinton squabbling with former Senator JohnE dwards over who’s the bigger poverty fighter:

The war on poverty

Here’s a laugh. John Edwards and Hillary Clinton are fighting (h/t: Bryan at Hot Air) over who has the bigger “anti-poverty” creds:

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Just one day after a challenge from presidential rival John Edwards to commit to raising the minimum wage to $9.50 an hour, New York Sen. Hillary Clinton announced that she had already introduced legislation to do just that.

“With stagnant wages and skyrocketing costs for healthcare, energy and college, working families in America need a break. That is why yesterday I introduced legislation to raise the minimum wage to $9.50 by 2011, and link the minimum wage to Congressional pay raises after that,” said Clinton in a Thursday statement. The senator said the measure was “the first bill ever to call for a $9.50 minimum wage.”

In her statement, Clinton said the new legislation had been introduced Wednesday, although her campaign did not release that information until late Thursday.

How about that? Clinton cares about “the poor” so much she introduces a minimum wage bill the day John Edwards issues his challenge, a bill that would raise the wage so high that it would put a lot of lower wage employees out of a job because the small businesses wouldn’t be able to keep them on staff.

The current Congress already passed an increase in the minimum wage, to $7.25 an hour, in three stages.³ If Mrs Clinton was so all-fired-up about a $9.50 minimum wage, why didn’t she actually propose such last May, when the Congress was actually considering an increase?

Let’s be honest here: she simply stole the idea — and even the number — from one of her competitors, but we are supposed to think that she’s the one with the great ideas, with all of the experience.

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¹ – 57-43 Democrat in the Senate, and 258-176 Democrat in the House. The largest Republican majorities in the 104th through 109th Congresses were 55 Republican senators and 232 Republican representatives.
² – Lurleen Wallace was elected governor of Alabama when her husband, George Wallace, was unable to run for another term. They campaigned openly that, were she elected, he’d still be running things, and she’d just be a figurehead.
³ – The Federal Minimum Wage: $5.85 – July 24th, 2007, $6.55 – July 24th, 2008, $7.25 – July 24th, 2009.