Clinton-Obama Slugfest

Summary

In one of the liveliest debates of the 2008 presidential campaign, the three top Democrats slugged it out in Myrtle Beach, S.C. We noted some low blows:

• Clinton falsely accused Obama of saying he "really liked the ideas of the Republicans" including private Social Security accounts and deficit spending. Not true. The entire 49-minute interview to which she refers contains no endorsement of private Social Security accounts or deficit spending, and Obama specifically scorned GOP calls for tax cuts.
• Obama falsely denied endorsing single-payer government health insurance when he first ran for the Senate, saying, "I never said that we should try to go ahead and get single-payer." But in fact he gave a speech in 2003 saying, "I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer health care program."
• Edwards misleadingly claimed, "I was the one who beat John McCain" in a recent CNN poll. The problem is that there is a more recent CNN poll, one that shows either Clinton or Obama beating McCain and doesn't include Edwards.

Analysis

Just three Democratic candidates took part in the scorching debate cosponsored by CNN and the Congressional Black Caucus in Myrtle Beach, S.C.: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards. It was the next-to-last such encounter scheduled for the Democrats prior to the Feb. 5 "Super Duper Tuesday" showdown when more than 20 states hold nominating contests. South Carolina Democrats go to the polls Saturday.

I Love the '80s!

Clinton attacked Obama for supposedly supporting Republican ideas, which she said included federal deficits and "privatizing" Social Security:

Clinton: [He] has said in the last week that he really liked the ideas of the Republicans over the last 10 to 15 years, and we can give you the exact quote. … They were ideas like privatizing Social Security, like moving back from a balanced budget and a surplus to deficit and debt.

Obama pushed back, saying he had never endorsed such notions:

Clinton: [You] talked about the Republicans having ideas over the last 10 to 15 years.

Obama: I didn't say they were good ones.

Clinton: Well, you can read the context of it.

Obama: Well, I didn't say they were good ones. …

Clinton: It certainly came across in the way that it was presented…

We can’t speak to how things "came across" to Clinton, but we’ve listened to the entire interview and to our ears, it’s just flatly false that Obama said he "really liked the ideas of the Republicans." Clinton is referring to what Obama told the editorial board of the Reno Gazette-Journal. A video is available on the Internet.

Here’s what Obama actually said in the portion to which Clinton referred:

Obama (Jan. 14, 2008): The Republican approach has played itself out. I think it’s fair to say that the Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time there over the last 10, 15 years, in the sense that they were challenging conventional wisdom. Now, you’ve heard it all before. You look at the economic policies when they’re being debated among the presidential candidates, it’s all tax cuts. Well, we know, we’ve done that; we’ve tried it. That’s not really going to solve our energy problems, for example.

There’s a difference between praising someone for having ideas and praising the idea itself. Obama is doing the former – and just as clearly not doing the latter. He says the GOP approach has "played itself out," for example.

It’s also false to imply – as Clinton did – that Obama endorsed Republican proposals to set up private Social Security accounts or that he praised deficit spending. We listened to the entire 49-minute interview, and Obama said no such thing.

Obama's Reagan Remarks to Reno Gazette-Journal, Jan. 14, 2008

[TET ]

Obama: I don’t want to present myself as some sort of singular figure. I think part of what’s different are the times. I do think that, for example, the 1980 election was different. I mean, I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that, you know, Richard Nixon did not, and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path, because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like, you know, with all the excesses of the '60s and the '70s, you know government had grown and grown, but there wasn’t much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating, and I think people just tapped into – he tapped into what people were already feeling, which is we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism, and, and, you know, entrepreneurship that had been missing.

I think Kennedy, 20 years earlier, moved the country in a fundamentally different direction. So I think a lot of it just has to do with the times. I think we’re in one of those times right now, where people feels like things as they are going right now aren’t working, that we’re bogged down in the same arguments that we’ve been having, and they’re not useful. And the Republican approach, I think, has played itself out. I think it’s fair to say that the Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time there over the last 10, 15 years, in the sense that they were challenging conventional wisdom.

Now, you’ve heard it all before. You look at the economic policies when they’re being debated among the presidential candidates, it’s all tax cuts. Well, we know, we’ve done that; we’ve tried it. That’s not really going to solve our energy problems, for example.[/TET]

I Love the '80s: Part Deux

Obama also has been taking heat for praising Ronald Reagan in that same interview. See the text box to the left for his exact words. Clinton tried to avoid mentioning that, for good reason, but Obama turned it against her anyway:

Obama: The irony of this is that you provided much more fulsome praise of Ronald Reagan in a book by Tom Brokaw that's being published right now, as did – as did Bill Clinton in the past. So these are the kinds of political games that we are accustomed to.

Obama is correct: Both Bill and Hillary Clinton have lauded Reagan’s political skills. Tom Brokaw’s "Boom! Voices of the Sixties" quotes Clinton as saying that Reagan was "a child of the Depression" who understood pressures on the working and middle class:

Hillary Clinton (in Brokaw book): When he had those big tax cuts and they went too far, he oversaw the largest tax increase. He could call the Soviet Union the Evil Empire and then negotiate arms-control agreements. He played the balance and the music beautifully.

And here’s Bill Clinton in 1998 at the dedication of the Reagan Building in Washington, D.C.:

Bill Clinton (May 5, 1998): The only thing that could make this day more special is if President Reagan could be here himself. But if you look at this atrium, I think we feel the essence of his presence: his unflagging optimism, his proud patriotism, his unabashed faith in the American people. I think every American who walks through this incredible space and lifts his or her eyes to the sky will feel that.

We’ll leave it to others to decide who's praising Reagan more. The fact is that Bill and Hillary have done it, not just Obama.

Clinton charged that Obama’s position has shifted on health care, from favoring a single-payer, universal system when he was a Senate candidate to the plan he favors now, which would provide access to health insurance for all but wouldn’t require it. Obama denied that he had ever said he would work to get a single-payer plan. We score this round for Clinton.

Clinton: Secondly, we have seen once again a kind of evolution here. When Senator Obama ran for the Senate, he was for single-payer and said he was for single-payer if we could get a Democratic president and Democratic Congress. As time went on, the last four or so years, he said he was for single-payer in principle, then he was for universal health care. And then his policy is not, it is not universal. …

Obama: I never said that we should try to go ahead and get single-payer. What I said was that if I were starting from scratch, if we didn't have a system in which employers had typically provided health care, I would probably go with a single-payer system.

But Obama's denial doesn't hold up. In a speech to the AFL-CIO in 2003, when he was setting up his run for the Senate, Obama said:

Obama (June, 30, 2003): I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer health care program. I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, is spending 14 percent, 14 percent, of its gross national product on health care cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody. And that’s what Jim is talking about when he says everybody in, nobody out. A single-payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. And that’s what I’d like to see. And as all of you know, we may not get there immediately. Because first we have to take back the White House, we have to take back the Senate, we have to take back the House.

That sounds to us like someone who's pretty gung-ho for a single-payer plan. But after Democrats captured control of both the House and Senate in 2006, Obama tempered his position. He said in a New Yorker interview last year:

Obama (in The New Yorker, May 7, 2007): If you're starting from scratch, then a single-payer system … would probably make sense. But we've got all these legacy systems in place, and managing the transition … would be difficult to pull off. So we may need a system that's not so disruptive.

But that was 2007, not when he was running for the Senate, which is what Clinton was referring to.

Clinton was mostly right when she attacked Obama for casting  130 "present" votes as an Illinois state senator. But she was wrong when she added, "the Chicago Tribune, his hometown paper, said that all of those present votes was taking a pass. It was for political reasons."