Distance: Hillary advisor says Obama "hasn't gotten s*** done"

It turns out that Barack Obama isn’t the only one living in a world of denial this week. With the end of the Obama era in sight and Hillary Clinton hoping to make Coronation Tour 2.0 more successful than the first version, she and her team are looking for ways to distance themselves from the man who beat them to the crown in 2008. According to Ron Fournier, Team Hillary has decided to emphasize Obama’s lack of action and accomplishment as a contrast to her superior ability to get things done rather than just give speeches.

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You read that correctly. Now pick your jaws up off of the floor:

Clinton is not worried about being associated with Obama’s policies, associates say. Her challenge is to convince voters that, unlike Obama, she can deliver on her promises.

“He can blame Republicans and all sort of structural problems – and get sympathy from a lot of us,” said one associate who spoke on condition of anonymity so that she could channel Clinton’s thinking. “But voters don’t want to hear that. They want shit done. He hasn’t gotten shit done.”

Ahem. Just what is this “shit” that Hillary has managed to get done? Fournier asked, and got … not much of an answer:

I had coffee recently with an adviser to both Bill and Hillary Clinton. Halfway through an animated conversation about the 2016 presidential campaign, he grabbed my napkin and sketched out how Clinton might contrast herself to Obama.  He wrote:

Consensus builder > Loner

Plodder > Celebrity

Listener > Lecturer

Doer > Talker

Interesting stuff. But this person was not able to tell me exactly how Clinton would align herself with the can-do attributes on the left side of is list – except to say “she has a biography and a background that lends itself to the case.”

John Podhoretz finds himself puzzled by this. Regardless of whether one likes Obama’s work, it’s a little difficult to deny that he actually got some things done:

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https://twitter.com/jpodhoretz/status/558340687780151296

Well, that’s the question Team Hillary can’t answer for Fournier, even while outlining this strategy. She quarterbacked HillaryCare in 1993 and derailed a 40-year Democratic House majority while failing to deliver a policy win — which Obama did 17 years later, even if the policy is a disaster. She served eight years in the Senate with no significant legislative accomplishments, and then four as Secretary of State with even fewer results. Hillary started off with the “reset” button (mistranslated, no less) to Russia’s Sergei Lavrov, and ended her tenure with the sacking of the Benghazi consulate on the anniversary of 9/11 after having denied requests for extra security from Ambassador Chris Stevens, who was killed in the attack. During her tenure, there were no major trade agreements, no hostilities ended, and the decapitation of the Qaddafi regime as part of foreign policy under Hillary Clinton nearly led to the fall of Mali, and made Libya a failed state run by terror networks and militias.

The chart is even more interesting than the argument it’s intended to support. Hillary’s a “plodder” rather than a celebrity? Since when? She won her Senate seat in New York not on the basis of a long political career there, but because she was Bill Clinton’s wife and needed a safe state in which to carpetbag her way to Capitol Hill. Outside of that, her “job” has been to bill six figures for personal appearances and get wildly inflated bonuses for memoirs. That also refutes the “listener > lecturer” and “doer > talker” arguments, too, since she’s been a professional lecturer for more than a decade and has made tens of millions of dollars doing it.

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Good luck, Team Hillary, trying to sell this as a distancing strategy from Barack Obama.  The most embarrassing part for Democrats is that they apparently can’t find anyone more compelling than Hillary to run in 2016 as anything but a third Obama term.

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