Centerfield

Free Pass Just As Easy for Hillary to Come By?

Middle Earth Journal suggests Hillary's the one getting the freepass:

If the media were judging Hillary Clinton on her resume, where should their attention have been focused? As Ms. Clinton's only publicly elected office, surely they should have been looking at her list of achievements as the junior Senator of New York, comparing the promises she made in ascending to that office with the results which have since been delivered.

However, at the national level, I never seem to see the pundits and debate hosts asking her about that record. Today I would like to take a look at some of the chief talking points from Hillary Clinton's 2000 Senate race, along with her early years in office, and how she has performed since then.

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The following is strictly a personal editorial - my conclusions having been a resident of New York throughout Senator Clinton's tenure here and observer of these events, promises and results. Hillary Clinton has not been the personal author of any true "disasters" for the State of New York, but neither has she delivered on her chief campaign promises. In truth, she has been largely invisible in terms of the state's local affairs. (All politics are local, remember?) As I view it, Ms. Clinton spent a large portion of her first term farming relationships and building alliances in Washington, DC keeping an eye to her political future. Since her re-coronation election in 2006, she has done virtually nothing but plan and run her campaign to be president. I will grant that she has done a satisfactory job in showing up for votes in the Senate, though many of those votes have been questionable in judgement, but in terms of serving the people who elected her and delivering on the promises she made, it has been a lukewarm performance at best.

Read it all, it's centrist testimony from the front row. I've been happy to share my centrist front-row take on Romney. Ron Beas looks to have the same advantage when it comes to Hillary.

And I think it's interesting that Ron is sporting an even-handed take. I mean, you're glad when your senator takes notice of your plight and tries to address it, as Hillary clearly did in Ron's account. But when the result is expensive boondoggling, isn't that a good place to start to worry? If Hillary is going to give us a feel-your-pain refrain and spend a lot of dough on splashy pie-in-the-sky seedlings never bear edible fruit, I'm not on board.

And if Hillary is telling us she's the hard-nosed and experienced leader who can really deliver change, we have a right to ask her why we should believe that. We have a rightt o ask that of everyone making such promises, from Barack to Hillary to Mitt to John McCain and right on dow the line,

I'm looking for a dose of realism here in 2008. So ok, candidates, every one of you should be ready to tell us all something we'd prefer not to hear.