We’ve written often here about how Hillary Clinton is the queen of inserting her foot into her mouth every chance she gets. But sometimes she does so in such a way that leaves no other conclusion to be drawn other than that she’s admitted the quiet part out loud about her authoritarian vision of what “leadership” should look like in the White House, especially when a crisis hits.
Case in point, an interview she did Sunday on Fareed Zakaria’s “Global Public Square” (GPS) program. Clinton was asked to be on the show to assess President Biden’s first 100 days in office and to give her take on the direction of the country. During the segment, the failed 2016 Democratic presidential nominee told Zakaria she’d give Biden “an A, [and] I’m a hard grader.”
But what really said it all about Clinton (and not in a good way) was when she got into specifics as to why she was pleased with Biden’s presidency so far (bolded emphasis added):
But it wasn’t until the pandemic that I think a truly working majority of Americans, crossing party lines as we’ve seen, because of the approval that Republicans and independent voters are giving Biden, suddenly understood in a clear way that, you know what, there’s lots of times when we need the government, and we’ve been exposed as lacking in the kind of investments and support that we, as Americans, should be providing each other with the government as our partner.
And I’m thrilled that, you know, President Biden is taking advantage of this moment to try to push the agenda as far as possible. I think both, you know, Presidents Obama and Clinton did, too, but they were more constrained given what the climate was politically during their administrations.
So, yes, I think it builds on a lot of what did happen in prior Democratic administrations. But it also goes further. And it can go further because people understand, guess what, you know, we kind of were failed by our government for four years when we confronted one of the worst health care crises, economic crises that our country has seen.
Watch:
This is the modern-day version of the infamous “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste” statement then-incoming Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel uttered at a November 2008 Wall Street Journal corporate CEO conference as the economic/financial crisis was unfolding.
“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before,” Emanuel, who went on to be mayor of Chicago, said at the time. Instead of being embarrassed by the revealing comment, Emanuel embraced it and has continued to use it. The philosophy itself was embraced wholeheartedly by Democrats in 2020 as the pandemic hit.
Clinton’s remarks on CNN Sunday just laid out in stark contrast the differences between her view of what leadership looks like in a national crisis versus former President Trump’s. Trump’s view from the start was that the various lockdowns that were being implemented could not last long because “We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself.” It was a theme he echoed throughout the year.
Trump seemed to be keenly aware that, over time, more government overreach via regulation and intrusion into the decisions being made by businesses and families during the pandemic would do more harm than good to the country. Clinton obviously takes the exact opposite view, appearing to believe that the approach to governing during a crisis is to actually go bigger and more restrictive than what was done last year.
What she leaves out, too, is that the economic crisis the country faced last year was a direct result of the various Democrat/media-approved lockdown approaches taken in certain cities and states across the country, which in general were more restrictive in blue states.
Prior to the coronavirus outbreak, the economy had been on the right track. But despite it, a few months after the pandemic hit the economy was starting to show signs of getting back to normal – which just so happened to coincide with states like Florida and Texas easing some of their restrictions on restaurant capacities, etc.
Lastly, when a political figure goes on national TV and says the federal government should “take advantage” of a crisis in order to “go further” with a more expansive agenda, people should be afraid. Very afraid.
While being a leader during a crisis does involve making some tough decisions, what a real leader does during such events is to look for ways to limit government overreach as much as possible rather than to exploit the people for a purely partisan agenda that involves more government encroachment and power grabs. Clinton’s cringeworthy interview is yet another reminder of why we should be thankful that it was Trump, and not her, who was in charge when the crisis hit.