Hillary Rodham Clinton, US Presidential Candidate 2016
Secretary of State 2009--2013, Senator for New York 2001--2009; First Lady 1993--2001
Age: 68
Party: Democratic
Education: Wellesley College and then Yale Law School
Strengths: Huge amounts of experience and just one Democrat opponent. Has the chance to make history as first US female president
Weaknesses: Seen by some as a throwback to a previous generation. Also faces accusations she is untrustworthy and out touch
Quote:
"Everyday Americans need a champion, and I want to be that champion"
Very new African-Americans (and Caribbean-Americans) may have read the book Game Change published in 2010 and widely reported and analyzed by both the liberal and conservative media. In the book, former President Bill Clinton, the darling of Black voters even today, was reported to be outraged that deceased Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts had endorsed the young Senator Barack Obama as a candidate in the 2008 U.S. Presidential elections over his wife Hillary.
"A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee," Bill reportedly yelled at Kennedy [Italics mine].
The book went into some detail about Hillary's 2008 campaign and the role that her husband played in it. The book noted: "Bill Clinton's main assignment was continuing to make phone calls to super delegates, in which he pressed the case for Hillary and against Obama aggressively -- at times too aggressively. [Again Italics mine] Clinton's message, sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly, was that the United States wasn't ready to deal with, much less elect, an African American president.
Today, the former president is making the case that America is not ready for a "socialist president" and defends his record, especially on the 1994 Crime Bill, that he's belatedly conceded was a mistake and offered a tongue-in-cheek apology of sorts. News Flash to Bill Clinton: a mistake is something that is not planned or premeditated. Signing of a piece of legislation that you knowingly understand will cause much pain and hardships to a particular group of people is willful, premeditated and callous at best.
So, is Hillary to be blamed for her husband's political triangulation that hurt many Black families? Is she to be held accountable for the 1994 Crime Bill as many of her detractors seem to say arguing in the affirmative in a kind of nebulous political offering of guilt by association? Not because she shared the same bed with the former United States president means that she somehow, by some form of yet to be discovered osmosis, became part of the policies that her husband championed.
I think that she should be judged on her merits and her merits alone. Let me say here that on principled policy grounds I don't always agree with her on some issues, as I also do with President Obama's positions. I happen to think that her foreign policy positions are much more inline with Republican Party's thinking than with that of the Democratic Party.
I also think that as ALL politicians she's bent and twisted the truth at times to satisfy her supporters and for political expediency. Its my opinion that she's a blind, "blinkers on," unquestioning supporter of Israel and that should she become President of the United States, she'll see the Middle East and its undulations and turbulence through the eyes Israel.
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