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| Former US President, Bill Clinton |
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| Hillary Clinton, Presidential Candidate, Democrat |
In a political
rally in view of the contest, the handbills and fliers featured clearly the former
number one citizen of the US beside his wife with a brief remark, “I’m a
progressive. And I want to get things done. I am With Her”.
However, in
one of the rallies, the 44th US President, Bill Clinton reportedly owned his background
as a Southern centrist and took pains to remind his wife’s supporters that not
all of America looks like progressive New England.
“It bothers
me to be in an election where debate is impossible because if you disagree
you’re just part of the establishment,” Clinton said.
“Our immediate past senator Mark Pryor, who
was defeated in a landslide in 2014 in large measure because he voted for a
healthcare bill.
“That doesn’t
strike me as establishment. And nobody alive in my state thinks he lost because
people thought he wasn’t liberal enough.”
Paying tributes
to his wife, Clinton emphatically stated that “She’s the best change-maker I’ve ever known, …
Just about everything she did had Republican support.”
Recalling his
administration, Clinton admitted that his government failed in 1993 when it
came to health care reform which he attributed to the number of votes he was
able to secure from the Senate, “we just didn’t have 60 votes in the Senate,”
the former president said.
“There
hasn’t been a single change in the health care in 60 years plus, since Harry
Truman tried to get universal health care, that hasn’t had 60 votes in the
Senate to break the Republican filibuster,” Clinton added that the S-CHIP
programme backed by Hillary Clinton interestingly won the support of Republicans.
“We can’t
get in a place where we’re so mad that we demonize anybody who’s against us,
where we can’t have any honest discussion about who’s got a better health care
reform [plan], where everybody that’s on the other side is part of some
mythical establishment, including people like Planned Parenthood and the Human
Rights Campaign fund,” Bill Clinton said.
In a speech
by Hillary, the presidential hopeful did not mince words in opposing vehemently
proposed single-payer health coverage plan proposed by his fellow aspirant, Senator
Bernie Sanders from the same Democratic Party.
“We got a
bipartisan coalition in the House and the Senate and we passed it,” Clinton
said of S-CHIP. “It wasn’t everything we wanted, but I often think of that old
saying, you know, a person who refuses a half a loaf because it’s not a whole
loaf has never gone hungry.”
She said
that the goal now had to be to build on the Affordable Care Act and defend it
against Republican efforts to repeal it.
“What we
cannot do is start over. We cannot take what looks good on paper, an idea and
say, you know what, we’re going to thrust our nation into a contentious debate
and start all over. It’s a lot easier to get from 90 percent coverage to 100,
than it is to get from zero to 100.”
Another top
shot in the Democratic Party is Mr. Rocky De La Fuente, businessman from
California, among others.
From the Republican
Party are Former Governor of Florida, Jeb Bush; Dr. Ben Carson (Florida);
Governor Chris Christie (New Jersey); US Senator, Ted Cruz (Texas); Carly
Fiorina (Businesswoman form Virginia); Former Governor Jim Gilmore (Virginia); Governor
John Kasich (Ohio); US Senator Marco Rubio (Florida) and Donald
Trump (New York) among others.
Presently,
Republicans hold majorities in both the House and Senate. They also are
defending more seats than Democrats in the 2016 Senate races. The latter holds
18 governorships and control of a minority of state legislatures against the
former which has 33 governorship seats in the US.
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