Business as Usual For Some

Imagine this, former President Clinton is walking through a hotel in Las Vegas with daughter Chelsea and he overhears someone telling someone else that if they vote for Sen. Clinton they will be given a job assignment that will keep them from going to the caucus. He then tells his story to a reporter and adds that he hasn't seen tactics like these in decades. Now remember that the former President doesn't do anything inconspicuously in public. He has secret service, staff, reporters and onlookers surrounding him at all times. And if this tactic was rampant as he accuses, wouldn't one person come and tell him that it happened to them which he could then pass on to the press for confirmation. I believe that the likelihood of this happening as he said is minimal.
So why does anybody believe him? When we know a man that lies and the circumstances don't support what he has told us why do we extend the benefit of the doubt most of the time? I do admire benevolence but at another place and time please.
The former President was cut loose after New Hampshire where I suspect he convinced his wife that he had a lot to do with her victory there. Now unbridled, he is bringing to bear the full-strength version of Clinton style politics. Their absolute belief that they are what the country needs and the Presidency is their calling creates the greater good that ordinary truth telling is subordinated to. How can you know when to expect truth or lies under these circumstances?
In an effort to find some truth I thought it would be informative to look backwards and check the stories from the States they've left behind. There is usually a somber tone when the storm passes and people stop to assess their decisions. Well it didn't take long to find people angry with Senator Clinton. Many felt mislead by the Clinton campaigns 11th hour flyer's which distorted Senator Obama's position on abortion. Especially some public officials who put signature to it.
We're also learning from victims of push poling in Iowa who said they actually voted for Senator Obama because they did not get deceptive calls from his campaign like they did from what they believed could only have come from the Clinton side.
Moving forward we have the latest and most sophisticated attack on Senator Obama by Senator Clinton yet. In this case she takes something Senator Obama said and twists it into something quite different. I'm replicating it here because it's so informative in a kind of look inside their heads sort of way. Senator Obama said to a Reno Nevada newspaper, "I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 60's and the 70's and Government had grown and grown, but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think he tapped into what people were already feeling. Which is, we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to the sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing. I think we're in one of those times right now, where people feel like things as they are going aren't working. That were bogged down in the same arguments that we've been having and there not useful. And the Republican approach, has played itself out. I think it's fair to say that the Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time there over the last 10 to 15 years in the sense that they were challenging conventional wisdom."
Now here is what Senator Clinton said Senator Obama said, in the South Carolina debate. "The facts are that he said in the last week that he really liked the ideas of the Republicans over the last 10 to 15 years... Now, I personally think they had ideas, but they were bad ideas. They were bad ideas for America. They were ideas like privatizing Social Security, like moving back from a balanced budget and a surplus to a deficit and debt."
So you have to ask the question, did she really not get his point? Given that she and her husband are on the record praising President Reagan in similar fashion in the past I think it's clear that this was a big fat calculated deception. It was ginned up partially in response to Senator Obama's less than glowing assessment of President Clinton's term but mostly because they will stop at nothing to win.