Tuesday, February 06, 2007

This is who we want for our next president?

Denny Hatch comments,
This past week an astonishing YouTube clip surfaced showing Senator Hillary Clinton addressing the Democratic National Committee Winter Meeting in Washington last week in which she proclaims:
The other day, the oil companies reported the highest profits in the history of the world. I want to take those profits and I want to put them into a strategic energy fund that will begin to fund alternative smart energy … alternative and technologies that will begin to actually move us toward the direction of independence.
This statement and this video clip will do to Senator Clinton’s candidacy what “I voted for it before I voted against it” did to John Kerry’s in 2004.

It will so frighten every American that owns a share of stock, that the Democrats would be fools to nominate her.

Hillary Clinton will not be elected president.
Boy! We can hope so. But I'm not so sure. Listen to the applause following Clinton's comments. And remember how popular the radical wealth-redistributionist Huey Long was in the mid-30s . . . and how fearful Franklin Roosevelt was that Long would take the 1936 presidential election due to his extreme populism.1

For some reason, Clinton's remarks remind me of what Dan Kennedy said during his Creative Thinking seminar last year:
What do you suppose the greatest regret at Exxon-Mobil is? . . . Not getting in the water business a decade ago. Think how mystified they are! I mean, water is $21 a gallon. So they have to listen to everybody beating the **** out of them, and yelling at them every day for $3-a-gallon gas which they've got to get out of the ground with people shooting at them. Then they have to go load it on a barge and ship it across the ocean and unload it off the barge into tanker trucks and take it to a gas station and put it in the ground2 and in the back room of the gas station there's a guy filling water bottles out of the tap and he's getting $21 a gallon for the water and no one's complaining.

Now, somewhere at Exxon-Mobil there's an old [guy] who's been there from the beginning who's saying, "Why . . . didn't we get in the water business? How come you guys couldn't see this coming, hunh?"


1 NOTE: For information about Long's ideas, see the Wikipedia article about his "Share Our Wealth" plan and the excerpts from his "Second Autobiography," My First Days in the White House.

As for Roosevelt's concerns about Long, consider some of the things Wikipedia's biography about Long says:
Long, in February 1934, [acted on his "Share Our Wealth" plan and] formed a national political organization, the Share Our Wealth Society. A network of local clubs led by national organizer Reverend Gerald L. K. Smith, the Share Our Wealth Society was intended to operate outside of and in opposition to the Democratic Party and the Roosevelt administration. By 1935, the society had over 7.5 million members in 27,000 clubs across the country, and Long's Senate office was receiving an average of 60,000 letters a week. Pressure from Long and his organization is considered by some historians as responsible for Roosevelt's "turn to the left" in 1935, when he enacted the Second New Deal, including the Works Progress Administration and Social Security; in private, Roosevelt candidly admitted to trying to “steal Long’s thunder.”
And,
Even during his days as a traveling salesman, Long confided to his wife that his planned career trajectory would begin with election to a minor state office, then governor, then senator, and ultimately election as President of the United States.


2 He forgot to mention anything about refining the stuff and dealing with all the environmental requirements!
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