 | abichara (60)
03/28/2008 |  This debate would be very interesting to watch, but it will likely never happen. Of the two, Bill Clinton is much more pragmatic and willing to cut deals where need be. Hillary, contrary to the popular media portrayals of her, is much more of a true-believing liberal than Bill is. While Bill is more of a backslapping, deal-cutting politician, Hillary is focused, ambitious, organized, and highly logical. On the negative side, she can also be inflexible and overly complex in policy proposals. She is also very unwilling to make deals when needed, as her disastrous health care panel in 1994 showed us. Those negatives have tripped up many Presidents in the past, and I believe that they will undo Hillary if she's elected.
I believe there are significant differences between Hillary and Bill, much more than is publicly revealed. Their styles are very different, although in a way, they complement each other. Hillary provides discipline and structure to that political operation, and Bill is the salesman who makes the pitch to the public. Bill Clinton, like Hillary though, tends to get too caught up in the details of policy making, so much so that they miss the "big picture". When Bill Clinton was President, they had a thousand different small initiatives going on, but no overarching objectives or big goals to achieve. They a big opportunity in the 1990's to shore Social Security and they missed it. Now with the baby boomers retiring, it will be much more difficult to solve the problem. On foreign policy, they could have done a better job in consolidating our victory in the Cold War by more strongly supporting a democratic Russia. Now with the rise of Putin, those gains have been erased and indeed, it's beginning to look like animosity is building between the US and Russia. And Clinton could have been more proactive in dealing with Middle Eastern terrorism. He could have done more to effectively isolate groups like Hezbollah and the nascent al-Qaeda movement.
So given all this, do you think that Hillary Clinton deserves a term of her own to extend or re-define the Clinton legacy? An objective historical analysis will probably determine that she shouldn't. Although I won't deny that she is very highly intelligent...
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