It was never really about busting her for a violation of any particular law. It was about painting her as a someone who couldn’t be entrusted in a position of authority with access to sensitive intelligence information. Boy did we dodge that bullet, eh?
how could they have acted worse than they already did? covert kenyan muslim and all the rest.
the gop blocked nearly every legislative attempt obama made, and they’ve made great strides since towards repealing every important executive order he enacted – so really, in retrospect, he might as well have just done whatever the heck he wanted. the results would have been the same.
heck, trump should just take a few of those hillary emails and retroactively make them code-word status, poof – now she is guilty.
really, why do rules matter at all?
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Fair enough. I always thought Obama should have shoved single payer through his first year in office when he had a Democratic majority in both houses. That may have made him a one term President, but at least health care would have been fixed.
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I’m sure that even if Obama and Hillary considered the “declassify retroactively” tactic they probably guessed that the fallout would make Clinton look guiltier than if she was exonerated by the investigations. And the investigations did in fact clear her of any criminal wrongdoing. They never could have predicted Comey’s 11th hour announcement (followed by the 11:59 retraction) that cost her the margin she needed for victory.
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In retrospect Obama’s central weakness was that he actually did try to act like a President for all Americans, seeking to find a respectful common ground between liberals and conservatives. America didn’t return the favor.
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“Shoving through” single payer might have made Obama a one-term president. More likely and more salient however, is that it would have undoubtedly reduced his post-POTUS earnings capacity.
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I doubt that.
How does that connect, and what makes you think that one of the least financially-motivated (not talking power here, just money) politicians in DC would have made such a major political decision based on some assumption of future earnings?
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The 111th Democratic-controlled congress fucked all that up. It was on the table, if you recall. But Democrats were the main obstacle to the ACA, not Republicans at the time. Drug and insurance companies lobbied the D’s to the point of confusion and exhaustion. And then the law morphed into mild insurance reform, rather than sweeping “how we do health care” reform: tangled, plenty of loopholes for insurers, lots of burden placed back on the public, no public option, states able to opt out of medicaid expansion, a state-by-state “exchange” experiment centrally run, no ability for insurers to sell across state lines and create bigger risk pools to spread out the costs from the sick, etc. The only wins were the rate reductions, piecemeal state by state medicaid expansions, no lifetime caps or denial for pre-existing conditions, and kids can stay on parents’ insurance until age 26. Except for a few other details, the rest of it… basically a big pile of shit. And we are in for more. It’s going to have to get REALLY BAD before it gets better. It’s insanity. I don’t blame BHO one bit. Democrats fucked this up and now Republicans are fucking it up even more.
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Obama’s first highly remunerated ($400k) speech post-Presidency was at a ‘healthcare conference’ organized by Cantor Fitzgerald. He would not be making that kind of coin off the Wall Street/Big Med nexus if he had destroyed their lucrative ‘business model’ seven years ago.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/28/politics/bernie-sanders-obama-wall-street-speech/index.html
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I bet he would trade that $400K for having achieved universal healthcare.
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Yeah, it’s pretty nuts to suggest that the only reason Obama didn’t bring Universal Single-Payer Healthcare to the country was that he was worried he wouldn’t be able to collect as much in speaking fees afterward. George W. Bush can barely string a coherent speech together and left office in shame, yet he still manages to bring in six digits per speaking gig. By and large those who seek the Presidency are after a more lasting form of immortality than a fat paycheck. (Some exceptions apply.)
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I don’t think he would have had any trouble bringing in large speaking fees from any number of other groups.
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keep in mind that the democratic contingent of the senate which finally managed to pass obamacare, with no republicans voting in favor of it, contained at least 10 democratic members; like joe lieberman, ben nelson, and mark pryor, who were considerably farther to the right than any currently serving democrat. also remember that 34 democrats in the house voted against it as well. there was no way to “shove through” a public option for government run health insurance much less a single-payer system of universal coverage.
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Well you know women and how they can’t be trusted with secrets, AMIRITE!!! /s
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It’s amazing how Trump is doing all the bad things they accused Clinton of, only worse, more blatantly, and infinitely more stupidly.
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I will admit that may have been the case. I still wish he would have tried.
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