Clinton’s Bizarre Attack on Her Husband’s 1992 Credentials to Be Elected Commander in Chief

The Clinton campaign is set to air this new, minute-long ad in Iowa and New Hampshire that has the feel of a closing argument: [picture from ad of a very solemn-faced Secretary of State Clinton standing next to Obama at the funeral of a fallen soldier or marine, and a link to the ad.]

— Greg Sargent, The Washington Post, this morning

Sargent goes on to say:

The ad makes the case that Clinton is the only Democratic candidate who has the fight, gravitas, and multi-faceted experience to handle both international crises and domestic economic challenges. The new spot has echoes of the infamous 3 A.M. ad that Clinton ran against Barack Obama in 2008, which argued that when your children are sleeping and a crisis is unfolding, the person you want in the White House is someone as experienced as Clinton.

But Clinton’s new ad is both less of an attack and also goes a bit farther. It is both an argument for Clinton’s fitness as commander in chief and an electability argument, in the sense that it suggests that only a candidate with this fleshed out a profile can win in November.

Good heavens.  This is someone whose husband was elected president in 1992 with government experience only as governor of Arkansas, against a sitting president who also attended military funerals, in his capacity as Commander in Chief, and who was a former CIA chief.

This attack is really dumb.

Clinton continues to run a really awful campaign, in my opinion—a campaign in which she’s spent the last few months adopting Republican talking points and making bald misrepresentations about Sanders’ policy positions, past and present, via strange sleights of hand or outright misstatement.

After taking a five-week hiatus from posting here at AB, I’ve posted a series of posts on the campaign in the last week, the most recent one titled “The little problem with Clinton’s message that Krugman doesn’t mention in his critique of Clinton and Sanders today: Her incessant claim that only taxes bears negatively against “incomes”.  The post was hastily written (I had only a few minutes to throw it together yesterday), and I’ve now edited it and added an addendum, which says:

Here in sum is the point: Clinton says that the only thing that matters to people’s bottom line is the amount of taxes they pay.

Which apparently is largely true for the wealthy, but is hardly true for the middle class and so-called working class–whose financial bottom line, financial security and standard of living is impacted tremendously by such things as healthcare insurance premiums, whether paid to the government or instead to a private company, and out-of-pocket payments to hospitals, medical labs and physicians.

That’s was so enrages me. Clinton claims by that soundbite of hers that all that matters is “income,” not income minus such things as private-healthcare-insurance premiums and out-of-pocket payments for health care.

That post was a follow-up to this one posted on Monday, titled “Why Do So Many Wealthy Democrats Think The Only Money That Matters To The Hoi Polloi Is The Money They Must Pay To The Government?”

Which itself was in part a follow-up to one I posted on Sunday shortly before the debate, titled “Pre-Debate Contest: Guess which one of Sanders’ past or present policy positions or legislation he supported that Clinton will misrepresent most outlandishly tonight.”

You get the idea.

Clinton certainly is qualified to become Commander in Chief. And as someone who is slightly more hawkish than Bernie Sanders, whose candidate I support obsessively, I think she would make a good one.  But I also think Bernie Sanders would make a good one.  Just as I think Bill Clinton made a good one.

The problem with Clinton’s campaign in part concerns the substance of her proposals vis-à-vis the substance of most of Sanders’, but she certainly is entitled to make her arguments on those, as long as she does not use Republican slogans to make them, and as long as she does not misstate Sanders’ past and present policy proposals.  Least of all, habitually.  And she does both of these things habitually; they’re mainstays of her campaign.

I’ve covered these points in the posts I link to, and I don’t have time right now to further elaborate anyway.  But if Clinton becomes the nominee, I dearly hope will somehow learn of my posts here at AB and take to heart what they say, because they will be pertinent to general election campaign, just as they are to her primary campaign.

Hey, maybe she’ll ditch her campaign consultants and replace them with … me!  I’d be wayyy better.  And I’m much cheaper.