Politico Says Obama Snarfed Hillary’s Winning Platform. We Say, He Still Ain’t Hill.

(Bumped up from yesterday evening.)

In his article Obama morphs into old rival Clinton, Politico’s Alex Conant posits that all Obama’s campaign promises which distinguished him from Hillary have now been thrown out the window:

A year ago today, with returns rolling in from the North Carolina and Indiana primaries, the late Tim Russert so famously declared, “We now know who the Democratic nominee will be, and nobody is going to dispute it.”

Russert was right, but Hillary Clinton, nevertheless, kept campaigning for several more weeks, fueled by her supporters’ convictions that her proposals were better than Obama’s. After barely 100 days in office, it now appears Obama agrees: Since taking office, he has dropped virtually every position that distinguished him from Clinton. Granted, there were not many policy differences between Obama and Clinton during the campaign. But those that existed were sharply debated and helped Obama define himself as the pragmatic change agent that many voters now believe him to be.

Change agent, my foot. The late Timmy was right, much to our chagrin and dismay. And perhaps, much to the dismay of his lefty supporters, who now see what we Hillary voters saw coming all along: She had the better platform. She knew it. Obama knew it, and what’s more the DNC knew it. The only difference is, they wanted a brand, not a leader. Barack Obama is the face they wanted on the jar of spaghetti they were selling to the American people and to the world – not hers. It is as simple as that.

Politico, who did as much electioneering for President Obama during the primary as anyone, should now also admit that, unlike Obama, Hillary was indeed honest about her platform and held the best and most sensible positions on important issues. She was always running as the general election candidate and never bamboozled anyone into believing she held one position in order to cull votes from another candidate, only to drop that position like a hot potato once those votes were in her pocket.

Politico, in this self serving little treastise, omits serveral other important points, however. Whatever policies Obama is adopting now that may resemble Hillary’s does nothing to diminish the fact that he is also maintaining plenty of policies of George Bush. Hillary never reneged on FISA, as Obama did, nor would she ever go so far as to expand these wiretapping provisions as Obama is doing. She would never expand Bush’s faith based initiatives, as Obama did. She vowed to put an end to signing statements. Obama is using them.

Conant states:

Take Iraq. …[U]nlike Clinton — [Obama] had a hard date for ending the war. Clinton repeatedly questioned the wisdom and sincerity of Obama’s pledge to remove all combat troops from Iraq within 16 months of taking office. It was the biggest difference between the two candidates — and one of the top reasons Obama won the nomination.

Yet just weeks after entering office, Obama largely dropped his campaign plan. Rather than withdraw all combat troops on a set timeline, Obama opted for a conditions-based withdrawal that will leave as many as 50,000 troops in the war zone at the end of 2011 — exactly the sort of drawdown he maligned Clinton for proposing.

Well, of course, because, as her husband famously said, Obama’s plan for Iraq was “a fairy tale.” But Conant is also oversimplifying the differences in their plans here.

Health care is another example. While Obama was outflanking Clinton on the left on Iraq, she made up for it by criticizing his health care plan as inadequate. Both candidates claimed to support universal health care, but only Clinton’s plan included a government mandate that would force all Americans to have health insurance.

Primary voters will recall Clinton and Obama endlessly debating this, with Clinton accusing Obama of leaving about 15 million people without health care and Obama warning voters that Clinton’s plan would require “harsh, stiff penalties on those who don’t purchase it.”

Just as with Iraq, Obama is now moving toward Clinton’s position. His budget outline proposes a health care plan that “must put the United States on a clear path to cover all Americans.” That strongly suggests a mandate, since any volunteer system would see some opting out.

But does that mean Obama is adopting Hillary’s exact plan, which was always better and far less expensive than his own?

Lobbyists are another case in point. Obama criticized Clinton for her connection with them and she said “a lot of those lobbyists, whether you like it not, represent real Americans.”

…Obama promised to ban anyone who had recently worked as a lobbyist from serving in his administration. But that promise was broken even before he took office, when the president-elect chose several lobbyists for high-level posts, including deputy secretaries at the Defense and Health and Human Services departments. (Ironically, Obama even nominated a lobbyist to be an assistant secretary of state under Clinton.)

Conant also states that Obama capitalized on the old “Hillary is divisive and polarizing” moniker hung around her neck by the Republicans, intimating that a Hillary Clinton presidency would be a return to partisan politics. I guess that’s why Obama met with Republicans a couple of days after being inaugurated to arrogantly proclaim, “Well, I won.” So much for the new era of bipartisanship.

As Obama confessed at his prime-time press conference last week, he’s fallen short on that front, too. Since taking office, the president’s agenda has been demonstrably partisan; nearly every bill he has so far signed into law passed Congress on a party-line vote. If Clinton were sitting in the Oval Office instead of Obama, it’s hard to imagine how Washington would be any more partisan.

And since Hillary Clinton has a proven record of reaching across the aisle, I doubt she would have conducted herself in such an arrogant fashion. Conant concludes:

Clinton lost the battle for the Democratic nomination, but a year later, it appears her campaign has won the war of ideas within the Democratic Party.

She won more than the war of ideas. She won the damned primary. If the DNC hoi polloi wasn’t so busy putting their finger on the scales to tip them toward Brand Obama, perhaps the American people would have had a chance to see that.

One week prior to the election, John King of CNN excoriated his colleagues in the media, blaming their “obsession with Hillary Clinton” as the cause for not vetting Barack Obama properly. That is no excuse, of course. While this national obsession of ‘blame Hillary’ may have died down in other circles, as Secretary Clinton is now enjoying untold popularity, higher than that of the President, places like Politico have not caught up. Is this article trying to capitalize on her great popularity now by saying that Obama is more like her — thereby basking in some of her current glow, or are they tacitly blaming her unseen, magical and all powerful influence for him reversing course on his campaign rhetoric. This doesn’t quite work for me, as even Prof. Jonathan Turley came out recently to note that President Obama is expanding policies beyond those of George Bush. I do not believe Hillary would do this.

Furthermore, there is a big difference between a leader and a brand. A leader is someone who proposes smart policies from the beginning and makes every effort to see the entire chess board in so doing. A leader does not just pick a policy, run it up a flagpole to see if he can get away with it, then if there is a hue and cry, drop it like a hot potato and pretend he was never trying to do it in the first place.

Does anyone believe Hillary Clinton, were she our President today, would have made the rookie mistake of reneging on closing Gitmo, then bow to pressure from the left the next day, sign an Executive Order to close it, then get stuck leaving it in place, possibly returning to military tribunals after all, only after the fact realizing she had nowhere to put these prisoners? That no one wanted to take them? No. That was President Obama’s rookie mistake.

Unlike our current President, a President Hillary Clinton would have thought through the ramifications of such actions and figured out where she was going to put these prisoners before making such an empty proclamation. You know, Senator McCain would have thought it through, also. And even said as much when he was interviewed about this very situation months ago. That is the difference between leadership and a brand. That is the difference between experience and empty theories or armchair quarterbacking.

A leader lets you know who they are up front and then stands by those principles. It is not only a matter of platform, it is about understanding how to execute that platform. Even CNN’s Anderson Cooper acknowledged, re the current AFPAC talks, that Hillary is “large and in charge.”

Further, leadership is about understanding the real facts on the ground. Platform notwithstanding, I suspect Hillary would have known better than to try and ram every part of the agenda down the American gullet at once. Since she has a far better understanding of the economy than he, I am confident that finding the financial floor and helping the housing situation would have been her first priority. I also doubt she would have stood before the American people to terrorize them into thinking America was on the verge of collapse.

I wonder if President Obama is figuring out Hillary knew what she was talking about after all. He’ll certainly never admit it.