Hillary’s Rough Week
If the Clinton campaign thought that their candidate was going to enjoy a week of relatively uncritical media attention—as if the mainstream press ever really criticizes Hillary Clinton—it cannot be pleased with the way things turned out.
The week began with the introduction of Sen. Clinton’s much anticipated and ballyhooed health care plan. The speech was treated with all the fanfare and media attention that a State of the Union address would command; but the candidate was not quite up to the task. The famously guarded and scripted Clinton resorted to hyperbole and scare tactics in lieu of arguments in her health care rollout, and stepped on her own message. She carelessly stated that “Here in America, people are dying because they couldn’t get the care that they needed.” Dying, Sen. Clinton? Really? No, not really. A Federal law known as the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) requires that any patient, regardless of ability to pay or Medicare/Medicaid eligibility, that presents himself to a hospital or a hospital’s emergency services must receive stabilizing treatment. Sen. Clinton’s image of emergency rooms filled with poor dying patients is both easily refutable and takes the focus off the candidate’s plan and puts it on her claim. That’s not exactly good message delivery, especially for a candidate that touts herself as the most experienced and prepared Democrat in the field.
Sen. Clinton, faced with vigorous pushback from the three leading Republicans, found herself on the defensive in subsequent media interviews the following day. Rudy Giuliani labeled her health plan as a, “prescription for an increase in wait times, decrease in patient care, and higher taxes to pay for it all.” Fred Thompson was similarly dismissive, calling the plan, “enough to make you sick.” Mitt Romney explained that Sen. Clinton’s plan wasn’t exactly the Massachusetts miracle, calling it, “a one-size-fits-all nationalized plan.” And now, barely four days after the big announcement date, no one is talking about HillaryCare 2.0. Indeed, it seems to have gone the way of the Y2K bug: all hype, no impact.
People will be talking about Hillary Clinton this weekend, just not for the reasons she would’ve liked, thanks to Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) and a little Sense of the Senate resolution that passed early Thursday afternoon. Senator Cornyn offered an amendment to the 2008 FY Defense Appropriations Bill that condemned last week’s moveon.org New York Times ad that called General David Petraeus a traitor. Recall that Giuliani scored points against Clinton on Friday of last week when he ran his own Times ad criticizing Clinton for her remarks to the general during his Senate testimony that basically called him a liar. “I think the reports that you provide to us really require the willing suspension of disbelief,” she said. Now comes Senator Cornyn and his amendment. How would Clinton vote? Would she find her Sister Souljah moment and vote to condemn the almost universally recognized outrageous attacks on a serving four-star general? Or would she side with her radical, left wing, defeatist base and vote to sustain the “politics of personal destruction” that she and her husband president once decried? She chose the latter. Given the opportunity to shore up the center, she instead chose to pour more resources into her left flank. Republicans won’t have to move too far right to exploit that opening.
Sen. Clinton is running a national campaign. She has long since stopped responding to her Democratic rivals and is trying to tack to the center to win over moderate and independent voters for the general election. But the events of this week have cast her as ever more liberal and ever more dependant on and responsive to her far left power base. This couldn’t have been how they drew it up in the vaunted Clinton War Room on Sunday. There’s almost no chance she loses the Democratic nomination, but many more weeks like this one, and she may well lose her status as heir apparent to the throne.
Mark Impomeni is a contributing editor at RedState and will soon be covering the White House for AOL’s new political blog, the Political Machine. He contributes a weekly column with a conservative’s take on the state of the 2008 presidential race for Political-Buzz.com.
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Great post. And you make a good point. She’s been trying to sound reasonable and moderate to the public at large, but failing to condemn the MoveOn.org ad, a very high profile ad, is going to make it more difficult for her to pull off her act.
Thnks, Erick for the kind words, and your support.
Mark, I must challenge some of your analysis some. Hillary just spent her entire Sunday taking on a tour of every talk show that I know of. I do not think she was challenged all that much. Her plan on Health care, like most of her entire political agenda, is socialism pure and simple, dressed up with nice sounding words like Choice and shared responsibility. I am not so convinced that most people are not going to fall for it. Rasmussen’s most recent poll says most Americans want some form of Universal Health care. This is something that conservatives and libertarians will have to debate tooth and nail in order to expose and that certainly has not happened yet.
She will absolutely take a hit for standing with Moveon over Petraeus but even so her week was mixed at best or worst depending on your perspective.
Mike, Hillary not getting challenged on the Sunday shows is not exactly surprising. That she had to answer any questions at all about her health care plan or about the Petraeus vote is. This is supposed to be a cake walk for her. It’s supposed to be a coronation, not a campaign. She’s so far in front in the primaries they may as well call them off. And, the Republicans aren’t supposed to be able to score any points against her. Every time she gives them an opportunity its a major screw up for her campaign. Last week, she gave them two. But, I guess it does depend on your perspective. High expectations is the price one pays for being the next in line and the media darling.
This blogger gives conservatives everywhere a bad name. People aren’t dying because they don’t have access to emergency care – people (in redstates AND bluestates) are dying because they cannot afford either health insurance coverage premiums or preventative care. And, according to this blogger, that is some sort of a crime against those of us fortunate enough to not have to worry about the bills.
EMTALA doesn’t cover mammograms or pap smears or colonoscopies or even a simple blood test. If you actually read the law, which this author clearly has not, it specifically bars hospitals from refusing “emergency treatment.” It also provides hospitals with numerous loopholes which permit them to refuse treatment to dying patients if another hospital is better prepared to accept emergency patients.
Not dying?… are you kidding? Seriously, have you never been to a rural hospital emergency room where folks are admitted with Stage 4 cancer under EMTALA, who might not be in need life-saving care if they could have afforded an annual physical? Should these Americans really be condemned for not being able to afford health care? “People are dying” hardly seems like a careless statement for a Presidential candidate to make when it’s true.
Hillary’s plan might be wrongheaded, unworkable and just plain stupid but at least she’s addressing a real problem. If Rudy and Fred think that health care is a purely lefty issue, they’re going to alienate a huge part of their base. Whoever wants to win the election next year better be able to get their head out of Iraq for a moment and get back to some of the real problems here at home.
And, by the way, “hyperbole” is a device used to provide emphasis in a way that’s clearly not meant to be taken literally – like “it’s hot as hell.” Hillary’s statement is not hyperbole (although kudos to the author for trying to sound persuasive by using an SAT word). While it’s true that “People are dying” may well be dripping with pathos, it hardly invalidates her arguments. If that were true, the author’s argument would be on very shaky ground indeed.
Back on RedState, this blogger responded to criticisms of his arguments by asserting that uninsured people should have gone to the emergency room…
“[b]ecause then they would’ve been cared for. Or maybe they should have bought health insurance, or gone to the doctor, or ate right, or stopped smoking, drinking, using drugs, or stopped engaging in high risk occupations, or looked for a job that provided health insurance or… These are mainly individual choices. How does this become society’s problem?”
Um… it becomes society’s problem when the costs of healthcare skyrocket for everyone because of all of the uninsured people showing up at the ER’s front door. As far as the author’s other brilliant solutions to the health care crisis, his arrogant and purely heartless attitudes are the type of thing that make people hate us conservatives. Seriously, I’ve had enough of this Limbaugh/O’Reilly vitrol. It was fun for a while but now it just makes us look like vicious morons.
If this is represents the level of “reporting” we can look forward to on PoliticalMachine, it looks like AOL’s got themselves another winner.
Mary C
Mary,
you think that if we gave blanket coverage to all that would solve the problem. That is typical socialized medicine mentality. The reason we have such innovative medical procedures that lives can be spared is because it costs so much. Entrepeneurs everywhere are looking for the pot of gold in discovering the next big thing. What all proponents of socialized medicine don’t understand that this is the rub. The reason all of this unaffordable medical treatment is out there that no one can afford, even though it would save their lives, is because those that provide have seen how much money they can make and thus pour millions and frankly billions into R and D.
What you want to do is make this free regardless of ability to pay. Now, how will this work exactly? Will only those that can afford it have to pay? If that is true then those with means will have even further health care costs. If everyone gets it for free then what happens is the R and D dries up.
You all attack all the providers of health care for being money hungry and uncaring, and don’t recognize that all of this innovation is available exactly because they are all money hungry and greedy. Once that motivation is taken away then all of the innovations that save lives also go away. I know this because in every socialist system that is what happens.
Michael,
You don’t have a clue what I think. You assume that my unwillingness to toe the GOP party line and expend all of my energy hating on liberals makes me one of them. Sorry, sweetie, not even close.
The last thing I want is my tax dollars funding an inefficient socialist bureaucracy, especially at the cost of free-market innovation. I don’t envy the healthcare in Canada or France (although, last I checked, France hadn’t yet lost their motivation to save lives and was ranked No. 1 in health care quality in the world). And I don’t attack providers for being capitalist, for-profit enterprises. I’m attacking the bloviating egoists who would rather bark “you’re either with us or against us” all while calling it “debate.”
I’m guessing that you’re one of those guys who waits to talk, rather than listens, during a conversation. Go back and read my post again, lover. My complaint is that the blogger thinks that EMTALA is somehow the end-all solution to the health care crisis when, in fact, it is one of the causes. I’m tired of “debate” on issues that, in reality, is nothing more then another back-slapping tailgate kegger by attention-seeking sophists haw-hawing about Hillary.
This blogger’s invocation of EMTALA is more ridiculous than thinking the tooth fairy will provide us all with dental care. It made me laugh until coffee came out my nose. That’s my complaint: he’s ridiculing her plan and offering nothing more than an insult to the intelligence of his readers. My plan, you ask? I don’t have one and I don’t need one because I’m not running for office. But I do have a vote and, like millions of other Republicans, I’ll be using it next year.
Stop wasting our time and polluting the real debate by writing uninformed junk like this. It does not help our cause. If you have something meaningful and important to add to the discourse, by all means, I’m listening. Otherwise, stop wasting bandwidth and find something else to occupy your free time. You’re not impressing us by puffing up contrived “arguments” unworthy of my daughter’s elementary school Civics class. You’re dragging down all of us who genuinely feel the issues facing Americans, and who seek a Republican leader who will find informed, effective solutions instead of the same pointless, empty rehtoric.
Mary Margaret