November 08, 2007
He Said, She Said
Bill Clinton today in Iowa took the blame for his wife's most public policy failing during her eight years in the White House: healthcare. By doing so, he practically -- and is it unilaterally? -- strips that line from Hillary's stump speech.
"She has taken the rap for some of the problems we had with health care the last time that were far more my fault than hers," he said. "Let's just face it. We couldn't raise money. This time, when you let the tax cuts for upper income people expire, it'll create a pool of money that wasn't there last time. We told her she had to get to universal coverage and there would be no new money. She had to figure out how to do it. She also was very vulnerable to a Senate filibuster last time. Because they were on the 'Just say no to Bill Clinton.' "
Here's the case HRC's campaign makes on www.hillaryclinton.com for why she's the most qualified to get a health care plan through Congress :
"Nobody has worked harder or longer to improve health care than Hillary Clinton. From her time in Arkansas when she improved rural health care to her successful effort to create the SCHIP Children's Health Insurance program which now covers six million children, Hillary has the strength and experience to ensure that every man, woman and child in America has quality, affordable health care."
Barack Obama, also in Iowa today, suggested that Hillary can't campaign on her efforts in the 1990s to get Congress to pass a health care initiative and then allow her husband to say she wasn't involved with the Clinton administration's failed plan.
"I’m not sure about previous characterizations," Obama said, during a stop at a gas station in Albia. "All I know is that part of the record she’s running on is on healthcare, so its hard to gauge if one of her claims is to have experience in this issue and then to suggest somehow that she didn’t have anything to do with the way it didn’t work."
When asked if the comment was a mixed message, Senator Obama first hedged before elaborating that the comment brought into question Senator Clinton’s claim that her experience trying to pass healthcare in the 1990s had allowed her to learn from her mistakes and would help her to pass universal healthcare if she were to win the presidency, reports NBC/NJ's Aswini Anburajan.
(JENNIFER SKALKA)
Posted at 06:51 PM
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