Hillary's attacks on Obama haven't been sticking, so this weekend she decided to ratchet up the dishonesty another notch. From The Caucus (emphasis mine):
And after weeks of attacking Barack Obama over his health care plan, noting that it did not include a mandate that everyone obtain insurance, Mrs. Clinton knocked him in a new way. In a hushed tone, she mentioned some of the women and men she met in Iowa who did not have health insurance or were struggling financially, and said she did not want to leave any of them without health care.
"Who gets to choose who’s left out?" she said. "Who should I leave out? I don’t want to leave anybody out. I’m not running for president to put Band-aids on this problem. I’m running for president to solve it."
It's like campaign jeopardy: "Please state your lie in the form of a question."
In this case, the lie is that you might want health health insurance but won't be able to get it, because Obama left you out. She doesn't put it in those words, but I don't think even her most dedicated supporter could deny that is exactly what she's trying to get people to think. I was raised to think that a lie, cleverly told, is still a lie and it's still wrong. Apparently she was not.
As most here know, Hillary's claim is flat-out false. The only way in which Obama's plan is not universal is that it doesn't force people who don't want health insurance to get it. He provides universal access to health insurance to everyone who wants it by making it affordable. There is a legitimate debate to be had about whether a mandate is a good idea or not. Will a mandate actually result in more coverage? How will people who disobey the mandate be punished? Will a mandate help get the plan passed because it decreases resistance from insurance companies, or will it be a political liability because people don't like the government telling them how to spend their own money? Will too many healthy young people game the system and drive up everyone's cost by a significant amount?
There are good arguments on both sides of the mandate question. The real debate is interesting, but the news here is that Hillary has has given up on the real debate. Voters apparently aren't too upset about the prospect of some healthy people choosing not to get insurance, so she's got to lie and say Obama won't let you get insurance. She's borrowing several pages from Karl Rove's playbook here: attacking straw-men, lying by implying untruths in the form of a question, and embracing fear-mongering.
This kind of campaigning seems strangely familiar:
Update re: the comments.
The "pantsuit" reference in the title is in no way sexist. Hillary has made it a signature style of hers and jokes about it herself. There are plenty of other wardrobe options -- something more casual, a dress, or a suit with a skirt, to name a few -- and she always wears pantsuits. That's fine. I don't care. It just makes for a good pun, and that's a joke on Hillary, not on women as a whole. An attack on Hillary is not an attack on all women. Many women are not Hillary. The overly sensitive, militant political correctness sometimes visible on this site is one of the worst vices of excessive liberalism and our side would be much better off without that reactionary hyperbole.
Just to prove my point, when you saw the title of this diary, you instantly knew it was about Hillary, didn't you? You knew it wasn't going to be about Madeline Albright or Janet Reno or Condi or Nancy Pelosi or any of the other women in government. Why? Because "pantsuit" is a Hillary reference. She made it one.
So how about you just focus on the content of the diary, and the fact that one of our party's major candidates is deliberately and severely misleading voters, rather than getting outraged about pants.