Hillary's Garnish Talk: Has She Finally Cooked Her Own Goose?

[ErnestoG]

Hang around US politics long enough, and you swear you see everything. Right here on this very forum as of late, I have seen Hillary Clinton's supporters, now driven into a losing momentum frenzy by the closeness of the race, devolve to spewing hate at MoveOn.org, DailyKos, Ted Kennedy, Oprah, and hundreds of others who had the audacity to support her opponent. I've even seen racist commentary when Stevie Wonder stepped up as an Obama fan. But, you rarely see a candidate put their foot in their mouth so theatrically, and right before a Super Tuesday, like Senator Clinton has in regards of her intention to garnish peoples' wages if they don't buy into her health plan.

Now to be fair, this wasn't just her idea. John Edwards had a similar plan. But Mr. Edwards is no longer running, and I highly doubt he would have stepped into the hornets' nest that Senator Clinton now has with this issue that has put the skids on her campaign, and possibly cooked her goose in the election.

Kevin Drum of WASHINGTON MONTHLY has a few comments about this, which bear thinking about: Not the least of which was the specter of the IRS getting involved in health care enforcement -

"First, do we really want the IRS enforcing healthcare mandates? That's not what the IRS is for, and Americans are (rightly) suspicious of using the IRS as a quasi-police agency to enforce whatever federal law the current administration feels like using it for. This is probably not a constructive road to go down.

Second, a Rube Goldberg enforcement program like does nothing except highlight the absurdity of individual mandate healthcare plans in the first place. If you're really this serious about getting every man, woman, and child in the country enrolled, why go through all this? Why not just do it like Medicare, where the funding mechanism is the existing tax system and everyone is enrolled automatically? It amounts to the same thing and it's cheaper, easier, and less intrusive.

Third, this is a political loser. Do we really want to treat people who don't sign up for healthcare like deadbeat dads and Chapter 11 refugees by garnishing their wages? Unless I'm way off base, this is just not going to go over well. Republicans will have a field day with it.

Sometimes you can offer too much detail in a campaign, and this is one of those times. No healthcare plan will survive the election in anything close to its campaign form, so why bother offering up a detailed enforcement mechanism that's never going to see the light of day anyway? Politically it's an albatross and substantively it's meaningless. It's just a mistake all around."

source

Yep, now I think I've seen it all. As if her IWR vote is not bad enough, she just plunked boulders into her knapsack while preparing to run uphill to the White House.

Senator Clinton, I think you just garnished your cooked goose.