What do you first remember from the Clinton Administration? OK, get your mind out of the gutter. I'm talking chronologically.

Remember the first days when they were trying to pass health care reform? The First Lady was the head of the task force. A month into what was to be a 100-day effort to pass health care reform, the task force was sued by groups associated with health care.

According to Sen. Clinton, these groups "had seized on an obscure federal law designed to prevent private interests from surreptitiously influencing government decision making and usurping the public's right to know." According to the former First Lady, the move was "designed to disrupt our work on health care and to foster an impression with the public and the news media that we were conducting 'secret' meetings." Excluding the press can cause that impression.

Senator Clinton said she "believed that access to quality affordable health care was a right American citizens should be guaranteed" even before she and her husband got into politics. In the chapter, "Health Care," Clinton delineates the problem of uninsured Americans. She blamed FDR's failure to implement national health insurance on the American Medical Association "who feared governmental control over their practice." (Next time you see your doctor, ask him/her if the insurance companies, Medicare, and Medicaid are exerting control over how he/she practices medicine.)

She also mentions doctors and hospitals raising their rates to those able to pay to cover what they don't get from those unable to pay. What she doesn't mention as a possible contributor to increased medical costs is medical malpractice suits. It would be interesting to know how much of her Presidential campaign war chest is compliments of lawyers. As senator she was the top senatorial recipient of lawyerly largess. (http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/indus.asp?CID=N00000019&cycle=2006)

As she wrote the book, Mrs. Clinton still believed the Democrats should have tried for a vote on health care reform saying, "Giving up without one last public fight demoralized Democrats and let the opposition rewrite history." Didn't she mean "write history"?

When Dick Morris, her husband's former campaign advisor, wrote his response to Clinton's book, he called it Rewriting History. Do you think he was trying to tell us something? He told about the time when polls during her early White House days showed that people thought Hillary "presented too perfect an image to be believable." Morris suggested that she put out a story about some imperfection she had. She promised to think about it. When he asked her about it a few days later, she said, "I really can't think of anything."

Well, I can. How about the fact that she deals rather loosely with the truth? Notable fallacious claims include being named after Sir Edmund Hillary who didn't become famous until she was six years old, that Chelsea was near the Twin Towers when they fell, and the recent blunder about a corkscrew landing under sniper fire in Bosnia. After the last one, she said that just proved that she was human. When she says something like that, I always suspect that she's operating under a delusion of perfection.

After Newt Gingrich's "Contract with America" (a/k/a "Contract on America" by those of the Democratic persuasion), swept a Republican majority into the House for the first time in 40 years in the 1994 mid-term elections, Sen. Clinton said, "He magnanimously offered to work with Democrats to push the Contract with America through Congress in record time." (For some reason my sarcasm meter went off on that one.) She wondered about her role in the loss and "struggled to understand how I had become such a lightning rod for people's anger." Poor Hillary; she's always the victim.

Elsewhere she quotes the recently assassinated Benazir Bhutto who, at a 1995 luncheon for the then First Lady, said, "Women who take on tough issues and stake out new territory are often on the receiving end of ignorance." Well, I guess she just told me.

Tomorrow--What Every Administration Needs Is a Good Scandal (or Two or Three)

Juanell Garrett--Midwest Voices '08