MISS HIM YET? NOT REALLY
No matter what President Obama's done (or failed to do), I've never regretted the outcome of the 2008 primaries. Wouldn't everything be so much better with the Clintons back in the White House? No:
Former President Bill Clinton, a stalwart backer of President Barack Obama who's already helped the incumbent Democrat raise funds for his re-election bid, said Thursday that Mitt Romney had a "sterling business career" as chief executive of Bain Capital.
That record, while qualifying him to be president, won't necessarily help him win, Clinton said in an interview on CNN's "Piers Morgan Tonight.'
"I don't think that we ought to get into the position where we say 'This is bad work. This is good work,'" Clinton said of the private equity industry....
I know, I know: Bill is Bill and Hillary is Hillary. But Bill is Hillary's top political adviser, and vice versa.
The fat cats are Bill Clinton's pals -- he hangs out with them, he raises money from them for charities, he lives among them. To benefit them, we got rid of Glass-Steagall on his watch. Yes, it's a mixed record -- he's the last president who raised taxes, and then we had an economic rising tide that actually did lift all boats for a while. I'm not ignoring the fat-cat-friendly policies of the Obama administration ... filled as it is with ex-Clintonites. I'm just saying I doubt Hillary would have been huddling late at night in the Oval Office with Treasury Secretary Krugman and Fed Chair Warren.
I've always assumed that Hillary's presidency would have been alternately heartening and exasperating, just like Obama's. Obama has drones and kill lists; Hillary was pals with John McCain (I really think she might have offered him a Cabinet position), and she's never exactly been a dove. I'm not even sure she would have done a better job of withstanding the kinds of assaults that have hamstrung Obama as president -- they would have attacked her as a socialist and endlessly "vetted" her supposedly radical past.
Obama or Clinton? I think it's a wash. I'd be fighting to get her reelected right now, but I don't think that's because she'd have been dramatically, or even marginally, better than Obama as president.
