that!!

Social security needs to be expanded NOT CHOPPED!

I think Obama can speak for Obama when Obama wants to. Don't you?

In 2007, he ran as a progressive. Starting in 2008, he governed as a corporatist.

His legacy, in its current form depends on Hillary. Obama wishes to be seen as a "progressive" (by his own words). And as long as Hillary keeps the bar low, he might be described that way in historical perspective.

ACA, TPP, and H-1B visas are not progressive policies in my opinion.

Sanders will raise the bar, and eventually, in retrospect, Obama will be made to look like a mediocre politician, which is actually my opinion of him.

who is SOOO afraid of Hillary Clinton that he gave her the premiere position in his cabinet and is still too intimidated by her to say what he really thinks and can't prevent himself from being "used" by her.

But you "have the greatest respect for" him. Right ...

do you think he would say no to the Clintons? he can't even say no to the republicans.

Just wow.

It's amazing how far some people have to twist themselves to avoid doing anything that contradicts the narrative that HRC is evil.

I'm glad she's being pushed to refine her message and to be ready for November, but I'm about ready for this primary to end.

...Sanders folks look foolish trying to make that campaign an issue when it ended with Obama appointing Hillary to one of the top positions in his administration.

He clearly valued her expertise in foreign affairs, despite his own campaign effort to denigrate her foreign policy chops - based, ironically, on the Iraq vote, as Sanders is doing today.

to use against him. She had no foreign policy expertise--that's a joke.

Nobody was looking to her for guidance, she had no leadership in that arena. Obama had far more of a formed philosophy/approach to foreign policy than she did. Hillary, like most of Obama's cabinet appointments, was a political and/or status appointment, not an expertise appointment. Not criticizing that, because most Presidents make such appointments. But this revisionist history where he chose her for foreign policy expertise is just laughable.

...Hillary Clinton's membership on the Senate Armed Services Committee was more than perfunctory. She pursued issues and answers aggressively and gained a great deal of her expertise in foreign affairs from that role, and from her service as First Lady, as well...

Hillary Clinton is the first New York senator to sit on the Armed Services Committee, where she has focused on improving pay and benefits for troops, both active and reserve. New York ha(d) the fourth-largest number of servicemen and women deployed in Iraq.

• She has co-sponsored bills to improve military health benefits with GOP Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Jim Talent of Missouri. "I think that generally her work on the (Armed Services) committee has been very strong," Talent says.

• She was nominated by the Pentagon — with which her husband often had contentious relations, particularly on gays in the military — to serve on a blue-ribbon panel studying how to foster better cooperation among the military services.

Adm. Edmund Giambastiani, commander of U.S. Joint Forces Command, named Clinton to the "Transformation Advisory Group." Clinton returned the favor last month by introducing him at the Armed Services hearing on his nomination to be vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Clinton says a combination of factors prompted her to make national security a key focus in the Senate: a long-standing interest in military and foreign policy issues, the fact that New York City was attacked on Sept. 11.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-07-18-hillary-cover_x.htm

. . . jaw-boned the authoritarian president of Uzbekistan to leave his car and shake hands with people. She argued with the Czech prime minister about democracy. She cajoled Roman Catholic and Protestant women to talk to one another in Northern Ireland. She traveled to 79 countries in total, little of it leisure; one meeting with mutilated Rwandan refugees so unsettled her that she threw up afterward . . .

Her role mostly involved what diplomats call “soft power” — converting cold war foes into friends, supporting nonprofit work and good-will endeavors, and pressing her agenda on women’s rights, human trafficking and the expanded use of microcredits, tiny loans to help individuals in poor countries start small businesses.

Asked to name three major foreign policy decisions where she played a decisive role as first lady, Mrs. Clinton responded in generalities more than specifics, describing her strategic roles on trips to Bosnia, Kosovo, Northern Ireland, India, Africa and Latin America.

Asked to cite a significant foreign policy object lesson from the 1990s, Mrs. Clinton also replied with broad observations. “There are a lot of them,” she said. “The whole unfortunate experience we’ve had with the Bush administration, where they haven’t done what we’ve needed to do to reach out to the rest of the world, reinforces my experience in the 1990s that public diplomacy, showing respect and understanding of people’s different perspectives — it’s more likely to at least create the conditions where we can exercise our values and pursue our interests.”

“She has done her homework on national security and I know from my personal discussions with her and with many other friends that go in and brief her in her role in the Senate Armed Services Committee. She knows the facts, she knows the details, plus she has the big picture. She is a strategic thinker but she has the building blocks of the strategy in her personal knowledge. This is someone that when she is president our military is going to respect very highly, and when our Senior Officers brief her and meet with her they are going be very, very impressed by what she knows and the intelligence that she brings to these problems.”

“As I think about the challenges facing the nation and having been in uniform for almost thirty years, worked with a number of presidents to include the last four, I can’t think of a single person – those generals included – who is better qualified to walk into the Oval Office than Hillary Clinton. I don’t make that statement very lightly. She is more qualified, in my view, than her husband Bill was when he entered the office. It is no surprise to me that you would have as many flag officers who serve this country and Secretaries of the Army and Navy who have served this country who would come out and support Hillary.”

“On a personal note, I have a Special Forces Captain son and a Sergeant Paratrooper both in Afghanistan and I find Senator Clinton the perfect choice to be their Commander-in-Chief and to display the loyalty to command our armed forces and to rebuild them after the conflicts in which we are engaged right now.”

“I support her because I trust her. I trust Hillary Clinton because of her judgment and her leadership. I have confidence that she is responsive to the needs of people. I believe that she understands leadership the way we do in the Army and that is that it’s about building connections and relationships and establishing guidance and leadership for others.

I think she’ll rebuild relationships with other countries that have been suffering for the last seven or eight years; those relationships have really been strained beyond anything I would have anticipated. Another part of Hillary Clinton that I think is just tremendous is that she knows our reality. She is in touch with people, she listens to people. She decides what she believes about policy based on what’s right, she has integrity, and on what works, so she’s practical.”

“I support Senator Clinton because I believe it’s time for change in our country, a new direction. And I know change carries with it risks. Senator Clinton is the candidate, in my opinion, with the proven experience that truly understands the risks and how to possibly cope with those risks to get the job done. We shouldn’t shirk from change because of the risks, but we absolutely have to have a leader with the proven experience. America, in the area of national defense, must be successful and Senator Clinton has that experience to create change, to understand the risk, and to get the job done.”

“In this world that we face today, very complex as all of us know, I think experience will be really at a premium, especially at the level of the Commander-in-Chief. There’s not time to learn. The phone rings and you have to be ready. You have to ready with intuition, with experience and with skills. And this world will have the complexities that perhaps we’ve never before seen. I’ve been impressed with and admire Hillary Clinton for her work in the Senate. And we need people with great judgment. I think she brings the best of talent, intuition and experience to handle these unknown threats in the future.”

aside, she was not a foreign policy leader. Not then, not even now. Kerry is. Clinton is not.

...and an absolute dearth of endorsements for your own candidate.

It's stunning how little support he has from his peers after decades in D.C..

...on what basis does Bernie claim his expertise and experience in foreign affairs?

just from being in Congress for decades. He seems to have good judgment, like not following the Hillary/GOP crowd on a no-fly zone in Syria. He's not a total pacifist or isolationist, not a neocon or liberal interventionist. Somewhere in between.

denigrating Hillary without quarter and with endless links and adjectives who are now promoting her with equal self certainty while denigrating Bernie Sanders without quarter. They look even more foolish than the people who spent 2008 denigrating Obama in the same terms they now use for Bernie, at least they are consistent Clinton boosters. I can at least think they have an authentic point of view.

...out of mere politics.

Barack Obama had an expansive and ambitious foreign policy agenda which was well served by Sec. Clinton in her role as the head of his diplomatic branch.

To me there is a difference between criticizing a sitting president or incumbent's policy and trying to destroy anyone's character to win an election. Policy is meant to be debated and question. I am for Sen. Sanders to have a primary challenger in 2020, just as being a Pres. Obama supporter I thought he should have had a primary challenge in 2012. The one thing I never questioned on Pres. Obama was his integrity and in 2008 that was questioned a lot. Granted it is all up to opinion, but I remember a lot of underhanded stuff being thrown at him in 2008.

Turned me off her for all time, and the Big Dog too. The leaked pic of him in the Kenyan outfit was pure sleaze.

and has to be above all that. But I don't.

Hillary Clinton is not Obama's logical successor.

Not for progressives, anyway. And frankly it doesn't matter which candidate Obama personally prefers. She ran to Obama's right in 2008, and is to his right today.

Neither Sanders or Clinton is Obama, or will govern like Obama. Sanders would be a move to Obama's left; Hillary to the right.

I get that Hillary would like to frame the discussion so that the things Obama has done that progressives like should accrue to her, but that doesn't hold together logically. She ran in 2008 the same way she's running now -- accusing the more progressive candidate of being a naive pipe dreamer who couldn't "get things done."

The reason is that polls show most Dems would like a President either more progressive than Obama, or about the same. I think it was 13% who wanted a more conservative Dem in the White House. But that is what Hillary represents.

So this is her core problem. She's once again the more conservative choice, which once again is not what Dems say they want. And she's once again arguing that her more conservative approach is more practical -- which in itself is not a terrible argument.

But she is also again arguing that the more progressive approach is hopelessly naive pipe dreaming, like her "magic wand" speech directed at Obama in 2008.

And on top of that, she would like to argue she represents the best continuation of Obama's most progressive policies?

It's an odd way to go about things, and highly questionable given how it worked out last time.

that's true people should be reminded of the magic wand speech that was directed at Obama.

But don't let truth get in your way.

He was opposed to the individual mandate, she said without the individual mandate, no chance in hell that we begin to even approach universal coverage. He was all individual freedom and all outweighs the concern for universal coverage.

You know who was right and who was wrong?


But hey, like I said, don't let truth get in your way.

I guess you could cherry pick a sub-issue somewhere, which is fine, but that doesn't change the "truth" of her overall position in the Democratic Party or the country. And she certainly isn't to the Democratic left on health care, arguing that single-payer is not even worth trying for.

Hillary is to the far right of the Democratic Party -- hawkish, unenthusiastic about financial or banking reform, and among the last to call for marriage equality, to oppose Keystone or question the TPP.

And there's nothing wrong with being a conservative Dem. That's where the Clintons made their bread and butter in the 90s, and where the Third Way movement they were part of defined itself.

The problem is that Hillary's trying run on the idea that she's part of the progressive policies Dems liked about the Obama administration, when her record and even her talking points show she's right about where she was in 2008 -- readily persuaded to wars in the Middle East and convinced Wall Street can pretty much police itself.

We're back where we were in '08, with Hillary arguing that the progressive candidate is engaging in wishful thinking and her conservatism is more pragmatic. But she knows that the bulk of the party doesn't want to swing back to the right, so she's trying to portray herself as "more Obama" than Sanders, which is pretty specious given she dismissed Obama on exactly the same grounds she's now trying to dismiss Sanders.

I never forgave her and her husband for how they behaved during that campaign.

And supporters expect me to feel any sense of enthusiasm over her?

which was unacceptable

may seem to be or can be twisted into seeming problematic...

yes I had forgotten about this

Basically only talk to themselves in an echo chamber of denial. It's pretty pathetic. Whatever happened in the 2008 campaign between Clinton and Obama is obviously long forgotten between them. She was obviously proud to serve along side him. He was obviously proud to have her serve as his Secretary of State, which last I looked, is what 4 in line of succession to the presidency. First among the cabinet officers. You've gotta trust and value a person a lot to put him or her in that high office.

But hey, none of that matters to the head in the sand, Sanders supporters.

treated him in 2008 - even though, he's obviously gotten over it quite nicely, thank you. But they're not too loyal to refrain from trashing him at every turn whenever they think it might benefit Sanders ...

But keep on telling black folk that Hillary victimized Obama and us but we just don't seem to realize it or we have some ulterior motive for pretending that we're ok with something that's not ok. We like that.

(and is running one now) and Obama was not the only one hurt by it. No part of that should be news to anyone in this country who was over 14 in 2008.