Holy crap….I cannot believe I am about to defend Hillary Clinton here but this attack is just plain silly:
In January 1995, as the Clintons were licking their wounds from the 1994 congressional elections, a debate emerged at a retreat at Camp David. Should the administration make overtures to working class white southerners who had all but forsaken the Democratic Party? The then-first lady took a less than inclusive approach.
“Screw ‘em,” she told her husband. “You don’t owe them a thing, Bill. They’re doing nothing for you; you don’t have to do anything for them.”
HuffPo is spinning this to be a “See! She did the same thing as Obama!” moment which is completely dishonest. In a angry moment she says screw them…they don’t owe you a thing. Compare that to the contempt and arrogance of Obama telling the world why those rural folks “cling” to guns, god, and bigotry and you have no comparison. They are worlds apart. She was angry at them, he looks down on them for the ignorance he perceives.
Now, this isn’t to say she doesn’t feel the same as Obama. I wouldn’t for moment doubt it, elitists are like that. And she most definitely is nothing but a power hungry, conspiring, socialist….but if you gonna try to take the heat off of Obama do it with something a little better then this.
See author page
assuming the author was actually a reliable witness as well.
Also that name of the journalist sounds very familiar….troopergate or something like that.
Curt,
Don’t beat yourself up. You’re not so much defending Hillary as attacking the tactic. This is all standard playbook stuff for the Dems. It’s repulsive whoever the target is.
The most telling thing to come from this story is not what Hillary said but what Bill (Clinton) said in response during that 1995 meeting. It’s basically the same thing Obama said. It was those comments that started this whole thing.
So are you saying Bill Clinton was OK to say say it because he’s one of those southern boys from Arkansas but Obama is arrogant because he shares the same view?
If you didn’t read what Bill Clinton said, here you go: “Perhaps even more telling than Hillary Clinton’s proclamation, however, were the words from her husband that followed. As reported by Barber, Clinton “stepped in, calm and judicious, not irritated, as if rehearsing an old but honorable debate he had been having with his wife for decades.”
I know how you feel. I understand Hillary’s sense of outrage. It makes me mad too. Sure, we lost our base in the South; our boys voted for Gingrich. But let me tell you something. I know these boys. I grew up with them. Hardworking, poor, white boys, who feel left out, feel that our reforms always come at their expense. Think about it, every progressive advance our country has made since the Civil War has been on their backs. They’re the ones asked to pay the price of progress. Now, we are the party of progress, but let me tell you, until we find a way to include these boys in our programs, until we stop making them pay the whole price of liberty for others, we are never going to unite our party, never really going to have change that sticks.
If the tone and tenor of the above sounds familiar, it’s because the message, Boyte says, is remarkably similar to what Obama was trying to convey in his now controversial remarks about small town America.
“Well, yeah, absolutely”, said Boyte, when asked if Obama and Bill Clinton were expressing the same political viewpoint (Boyte said he and his organization are neutral in the presidential race). “I think Obama’s better-or-worse versions of this have always been that people are complicated. It comes from an organizing perspective. You don’t write off people, everyone is complicated. It just depends on the issue. And that’s what Bill Clinton was saying. He was a sentimental populist.”