Kerrey said that, then he made the "Hussein"/"Muslim" remark. Message:
Ahem, 95%
white Iowa and 96% white New Hampshire, Barack Obama is black in the way
those shiftless black teenagers who haunt your nightmares are black. And he's a
camel jockey named Hussein as well.
Fast forward a month, and Sen. Obama made a statement that made a general comparison of his movement to that of Pres. Ronald Reagan in 1980. No where in that statement did Obama praise policies of Reagan, rather, he made a nuanced point (by nuanced, I mean the kind of point only liberals claim to understand) about a politician's place in a certain point in American history and a general shift in a nation's point of view. Obama pointed to the growth of government and the resulting backlash. The backlash wasn't a product of Reagan, instead, Reagan was a product of that backlash.
As an example, deregulation of business preceded the election of Ronald Reagan. President Carter deregulated the airline industry in 1978 and followed it with more legislation to lessen the role of government. However Ronald Reagan capitalized on the frustration with large government just as he did with the anti-tax sentiment that preceded his election, evidenced by the passage of Proposition 13 in California during 1978.
Obama's statements were met with criticism by John Edwards and Clinton, which is pretty understandable, yet hypocritical. Edwards's wife once compared him to the very conservative Sen. Jesse Helms , while Sen. Clinton has a story on her website that states she places Reagan among her favorite Presidents:
But no president can do it alone. She must break recent tradition, cast
cronyism aside and fill her cabinet with the best people, not only the best
Democrats, but the best Republicans as well.. We’re confident she will do that.
Her list of favorite presidents - Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Lincoln, both
Roosevelts, Truman, George H.W. Bush and Reagan - demonstrates how she thinks.
As expected, Bill Clinton was also included on the aforementioned list.
Obama caught quite a bit of crap from the "you are with us or against us" extreme partisan hacks who feel that Republicans should only be brought up in the most negative of terms. Both Reagan and Gingrich were allowed to speak in glowing terms of Franklin Roosevelt without such backlash and demands for conformity, yet they are in the party that is supposed to be narrowminded and authoritarian
No controversy would be complete without some words of wisdom from Pres. Bill Clinton, who said :
"Her principal opponent said that since 1992, the Republicans have had all the
good ideas," Clinton told a crowd in Pahrump this morning. "It goes along with
their plan to ask Republicans to become Democrats for a day and caucus with you
tomorrow, and then go back and become Republicans so they can participate in the
Republican primary. I'm not making this up, folks."
Except Clinton is making it up. I am not a Democrat, so I can't call Bill Clinton a liar without being called a hater, dittohead or accused of mindlessly stating right wing talking points. So I will let a lefty call Bill Clinton out as a liar at the following link. Kos even calls out Edwards for being dishonest:
A nicely crafted straw man argument, if I've ever seen one. Bravo, John,
for being an ass and dishonestly distorting what Obama said!
The weirdest thing about having Bill Clinton run this kind of attack is that he is the man who neatly summed up the discontent at government that Obama referenced, when Clinton said it loud and said it proud: "The era of big government is over". Pres. Clinton pushed through a series of acts that were to the right of what Reagan accomplished: welfare reform, media deregulation, banking deregulation, and capital gain tax cuts.
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