Hillary should be the democratic nominee… Obama should Opt-Out..

If Americans in their infinite wisdom choose to keep a Democrat in the White House through 2016, let it be Hillary Clinton.

Increasingly the question of whether President Obama should be challenged for the 2012 nomination is surfacing among disgruntled Democrats worried about a solid Republican victory next fall.

They’re right to be concerned: the crises facing the United States and the world deserve better than Obama’s oldest established permanent floating re-election campaign.

There’s no doubt Clinton’s tireless and often effective performance as secretary of state demonstrates she would bring more seasoned judgment to the Oval Office than its current resident. Here are a just a few reasons the Democratic Party should bite the bullet and jettison the nation’s one-term Senate orator and try to elect the nation’s first woman president.

Beginning with the political dimension of his conduct of the war in Afghanistan to class war at home, Obama’s priorities seem to be governed more by his re-election timetable than the demands of the national interest and reflective responses to the galloping changes in the global order

Contrary to mainstream opinion, Obama is a mediocre politician. Were it not so, surely he would have known that people get wise to polished repetitive, but empty speeches — and know the difference between bread and butter now and pie in the sky later.

Joblessness and fear of watching retirement savings vanish weigh heavier on the nation’s collective mind than long-range climate change and health care reform. The president’s touted political instincts should have told him all that. But, as James Carville once noted so cogently, “It’s the economy, stupid!”

But while Obama talked jobs and initiated a jobs bill on his sixth day in office, almost all of his mind and determination remained focused on health care — his overriding priority.

There is more. Even a short and substantively fruitless effort in spring 2009 to get agreement on a new U.N. climate change protocol outranked jobs at home on Obama’s must-do list.

Health care came first, no matter what. The president spent a year getting it on the books, while he assured the country that his close to trillion-dollar economic stimulus program was creating jobs.

He lost no time proclaiming the recession over — blind and deaf to the reality that it was a “jobless recovery.” He saw the upticking Gross National Product statistics and forgot or never understood they reflected only record earnings of financial institutions.

Hillary Clinton with her wealth of experience as first lady, a two-term senator from New York and now the world’s leading diplomat would hardly have been so blind.

Obama’s economic stimulus was a bust because, among his many other blunders, he left the writing of the legislation to Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats in their veto-proof Congress — without benefit of Republican input. As a result, Congress presented him with a Christmas tree adorned with pork barrels, but bare of jobs with a future.

. Her party — and her country — badly need her services. She’s likely the only potential winner the Democrats can muster.

Bogdan Kipling is a Canadian journalist in Washington.

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RUN – HILLARY – RUN

Some posters are having trouble having their thoughts posted on asking Hillary to please run Telling her how much we need her… You can post here as an alternative and we will forward your posts to Hillary personally.

from the William J. Clinton blog:

Here is a short conversation between my friend Rumana and President Clinton Dec 9 at a book signing in Chappaqua. Here is Rumana’s synopsis:

I said to him hello Mr. President me and my friends want to know if Hillary will run, and I mean in 2012 and not 2016. He paused for a sec. And said she keeps saying no but if she gets enough encouragement maybe she will change her mind.

I said you should go to S4h FB page and see we are encouraging her. He put his hand on my shoulder and said if lot more people encourage her maybe she will run. I said Mr. President we are talking about 2012 please do something. He said she needs to know you are there for her and I said please tell her.

Go to the blog Still4Hill to post

http://still4hill.wordpress.com/2011/12/09/please-hillary-run/#comment-23550

………..

Please, Hillary, Run!

December 9, 2011 by still4hill

On this blog there is a long archive which, at some point in August, I began entitling “Media Reads on a Hillary Run.” The comment threads on those posts are chock-full of comments from HRC’s supporters who wish she would run again for POTUS and not wait until 2016 to do so. Many of us are dissatisfied to the point of infinite frustration with the way Barack Obama has squandered his golden opportunity to bring real change as he promised. Most of us did not vote for him and did vote for HRC.

The list of reasons is long, but encapsulated comprises:

1. The Leadership Deficit:

Obama’s inability to break the shell of his West Wing office and reach out to the opposition in a human and social fashion. He would have been far more effective with the GOP had he approached them as human beings, had a few people, Boehner, McConnell over for lunch, and given Lisa Murkowski a congratulatory call for her amazing write-in victory, than he proved to be by having them over for secret meetings where he lectured and adopted the stance of “the adult in the room.”

2. The Stalled Car:

For a long period last year, he and his speech writers really liked that car metaphor, but the truth was that the car was stalled. It stalled over the Gulf oil spill and the jobs the government could have generated with a CCC type effort to clean up the gulf. In fact, from day one, jobs should have been a priority but were put on a back burner for a badly flawed and wanting health care plan wherein he withdrew the single payer option.

3. The Phenomenal Collapsing President:

Every time the Republicans stood shoulder to shoulder, Obama simply laid down on the tracks and gave the GOP what they wanted (or he thought they wanted) before they even demanded it. He was, according to John Conyers, the one who offered up the social safety nets on a silver platter before they even brought up that subject during last August’s budget crisis. The GOP candidates are correct. Obama is an appeaser. Not in foreign policy. He appeases them on domestic issues without even being asked. We have seen almost three years of this!

4. The Hesitation Blues:

How long must we wait? Obama left for an August vacay saying he would introduce a jobs bill after he got back .. after Labor Day. Americans who are out of work could not afford that wait. They do not have vacations, and, while Labor Day is a holiday for those of us who have jobs, they have no holidays. It is simply another day when they cannot look for a job. In the foreign policy arena, he waited longer than necessary to establish the No Fly Zone in Libya, and we do know that HRC rounded up a posse to change his mind.So this evening I have no media articles to prompt this post. Instead I have a short conversation between my friend Rumana and President Clinton this afternoon at a book signing in Chappaqua. Here is Rumana’s synopsis:

“I said you should go to S4h FB page and see we are encouraging her. He put his hand on my shoulder and said if lot more people encourage her maybe she will run. I said Mr. President we are talking about 2012 please do something. He said she needs to know you are there for her and I said please tell her.”

So this is OUR golden opportunity!

Please comment  also at the Facebook page. President Clinton, and maybe even our preferred candidate, Hillary Rodham Clinton, will be looking there for our encouragement. Let’s go all out this weekend and let her see the support that is out here!
Hillary, may we have this dance? You are the best hope to put this country back on the rails. You are the best qualified for this hands down!

We need you! Please, please listen to us. Please run!!!!

The Clinton doctrine on economic statecraft: Clinton to urge U.S. diplomats to put economics at top of foreign policy agenda

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi Sept. 26, 2011. (David Karp/AP)

There is no shortage of players jostling for turf on the complex matter of Chinese currency valuations. Witness Senate Democrats’ vow to take up legislation this week that could sanction China for allegedly undervaluing the yuan–at the cost, according to Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), of American jobs.

As a practical matter, the delicate work of managing relations with China–the leading creditor of the United States–falls only in part to America’s top diplomat, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. But if she has her way, she’d have more of a say.

If the fight against terrorism dominated American foreign policy in the decade after 9/11, the decade ahead could well be defined by efforts to manage the U.S. role in the global economy.

And in many ways, Hillary Clinton’s diplomatic portfolio is increasingly dominated by global economic challenges. Trade issues obviously have a direct impact on America’s efforts to emerge from the present economic downturn–from the battles over the national debt to the need to stimulate job growth. But economic issues also shape other less-noted features of the American foreign-policy agenda, be it the effort to contain fallout from Europe’s debt crisis, to managing the rise of G20 economic powers such as Brazil, Turkey and India—all of whom come bearing their own foreign policy ambitions. As a result, diplomats say, economic and foreign policy are growing ever more intertwined.

“The trading floor is increasingly replacing the battlefield as the forum for state contacts,” according to one of Clinton’s State Department advisers, who spoke on condition of anonymity so as to describe the department’s economic plans more broadly.

So Hillary Clinton has been working hard to beef up the economic bench strength of the State Department, while also mounting a bid for State officials to play a more decisive role in determining U.S. global economics policy. Aides expect her to lay out what they are calling the “Clinton doctrine on economic statecraft” early this month, likely in a speech in New York. Timing and venue for the address are still being worked out, her aides say.

“This is coming from a sense that we are seeing the lines between national security and economic security blur as emerging powers are doing more to advance their economic power, and fitting their national security strategy more around economic interest,” the State Department adviser told The Envoy Friday.

A key precept in this effort is addressing a kind of cultural lag in the antiquated world of bureaucratic Washington. Lead policy makers may recognize the pivotal role that economics plays in global diplomacy–but in many ways, the diplomatic bureaucracy needs to catch up. Clinton’s planned speech is in large part a call to her own agency’s ambassadors, diplomatic staff and analysts to shift their thinking.

And as Secretary Clinton lays out that vision in more detail, she will stress two main bulwarks, aides say. First, she will highlight the need to advance relations with the wider world as part of the effort to revive the American domestic economic order. And second, she will stress that State Department diplomats and foreign policy thinkers need to work harder to understand how market forces are driving first-order national security challenges in hot spots such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran.

Clinton’s strong interest in global economics issues is hardly a secret. She has denied persistent rumors that she has her eye on the World Bank chief job when Robert Zoellick’s tenure ends next fall.

But such Beltway speculation aside, it’s hard not to notice the many ways that Clinton has started to sound like a World Bank or Treasury official as she holds down her present job at the State Department. And she’s managing the department with a clear eye toward bulking up its economics portfolio.

Clinton has made several recent hires in her corps of advisers, with backgrounds in economics and finance. She has launched a new energy security bureau–headed by special envoy/coordinator Carlos Pascual, the former U.S. ambassador to Mexico, aided by new deputy assistant secretary Amos Hochstein. She’s brought on a deputy secretary of state for management and budgets from Wall Street (Morgan Stanley’s Tom Nides). And she has been pushing for the State Department to work prominently in framing American economic policy objectives more broadly. That means, in part, elbowing State’s way into inter-agency discussions on U.S. international economic policy-making. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk and Clinton are at the heart of this scrum; Clinton’s aide won’t handicap her chance of winning–these are diplomats, remember?–but the aide stressed that she’s taking the long view.

In her in-house think tank, State Department policy planning chief Jake Sullivan, and senior adviser Jennifer Harris, a lawyer and economist who worked on the intelligence community’s Global Trends 2025 report (pdf), have been among the key thinkers helping Clinton flesh out her approach to economic statecraft. Sullivan and Harris arranged a “deep dive” on the issue for Clinton back in February.

Clinton explained the logic behind the new economic initiatives recently in Hong Kong.

“As we pursue recovery and growth, we are making economics a priority of our foreign policy,” Clinton said at the International Institute for Strategic Studies-Shangri La conference in Hong Kong in July. “Because increasingly, economic progress depends on strong diplomatic ties and diplomatic progress depends on strong economic ties. And so the United States is working to harness all aspects of our relationships with other countries to support our mutual growth.”

“All of us here today recognize that a strong economy at home is vital to America’s leadership in the world,” Clinton similarly told the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition conference in July, before sounding a retrospective note about her tenure at State. “After spending two and a half years as your Secretary of State, traveling nearly 600,000 miles, I have reached one overarching conclusion: Simply put, we need to up our game.”

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/envoy/clinton-doctrine-economic-statecraft-clinton-moves-put-economics-110046068.html

Who would be doing better? Hillary or Baby Boy Barack?

****TALK ABOUT SKEWING THE POLL… ADDING THE WORSE COLUMN TOGETHER

divide by 3= 26.67%**** (not 28%) Hillary Wins by a slight margin

A Fox News/Opinion Dynamics telephone survey of 900 registered American voters conducted Sept. 29 and 30 found that 27 percent think Hillary Clinton would have been doing a better job than Barack Obama had she won last year’s presidential election. On the other hand, 28 percent said she would be doing worse.

The margin of error is 3 percentage points, so that’s probably not a statistically significant difference. Overall, it appears people, regardless of their political affiliation, are more or less divided on who would be a better president, though Republicans skew a bit toward Clinton and Democrats a bit toward Obama.

If this poll is even half accurate, then the so called Democrats are just plain jealous of Hillary’s success. If 27% say that she would do worse than Obama as president, then I have to seriously question their judgment.

Independents are right down the middle, which I pretty much expected. The Republicans surprised me however. 34% said that she would do a better job than Obama would. That’s showing some surprising strength for a party that hounded her and her husband for eight years. Then again, the Republicans hope the Democrats keep doing what they are doing and they will happily remove the Democrats from their seats in November. Bwaaaahaha!