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Jewish World Review June 19, 2006 / 23 Sivan, 5766 Hillary will never retreat By Dick Morris
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Hillary Clinton's stubborn tenacity in backing the War in Iraq is actually a lot like her performance in 1993-4 — when she stuck by her health-care reform initiative despite endless political headaches.
Yes, "HillaryCare" was the ultimate in liberal positioning, where her stand on the war puts her on the center-right of the Democratic Party. But the stylistic similarities are striking. The same approach marks both positions — and, I'd believe, offers a profile of what a disaster she would be as president.
Consider the parallels. In each case, Hillary was/is deeply convinced of her position's correctness. Like President Lyndon Johnson facing a mounting storm of popular criticism over Vietnam (and Abraham Lincoln confronting the same during the Civil War), she is convinced that her position on the War in Iraq is not only right, but the only responsible and reasonable position one can take.
She knows that the war is unpopular and is hurting her in the Democratic Party - but persists in supporting it because she's deeply convinced that it is the right thing to do. She may once have backed the War on Terror in order to pose as a hawk to cement her qualifications for the job of commander-in-chief, but she has stuck to her position long after it has become a political liability.
In 1993, Hillary's health-care proposals were widely popular and she got high ratings for her preparedness and depth of knowledge in the field. By mid '94, however, her legislation had come to be seen as taking choice away from patients and setting up government-managed health care — yet she still firmly believed in her proposals and would neither abandon them nor compromise.
In a stubbornness as self-destructive and short-sighted as President Woodrow Wilson's refusal to modify his League of Nations charter (which led the Senate to reject U.S. membership), she went down with the ship.
Now as then, Hillary refuses to seek a way out even as her position costs her politically. She can't imagine setting a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq anymore than she could see herself giving way on health care. Now as then, she is deeply sure that she has better information than her critics and that she sees things more clearly and objectively than they do.
In the case of health care, she fell under the spell of Ira Magaziner, the utopian guru who designed her Rube Goldberg health-care scheme, one so complex that it took more than 1,000 pages to spell it out. On the war, she seems to have fallen under the influence of the other members of the Armed Services Committee, on which she sits, and on the be-ribboned uniforms that attend their gatherings.
I happen to agree with her on Iraq (we should not set a timetable for withdrawal; it would just encourage our enemies to wait us out), where I disagreed (and still do) with her health-care proposals.
But I'm struck by how the streaks of stubborn refusal to listen to the views of others, and doctrinaire belief in her own rectitude, that animated her conduct during the health-care debate seem present also in the current discussion.
It is vital that a president not get "stuck" in a fixed position in which he has no room to maneuver. Johnson in Vietnam, Jimmy Carter in the hostage crisis, the first George Bush on the recession are all examples of a president surrendering his capacity for adjustment and changes in positioning. In each of these instances, the chief executive saw no alternative but to hue to the hardline he had carved out initially and suffered for it.
Hillary Clinton would be just such a president — she'd wind up getting stuck advocating something that turns out to be unpopular, but would be too sure of her virtue to change her mind. Like on health care. Like on Iraq.
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© 2006, Dick Morris
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Mitch Albom | |||||||||||
