Four years ago, the Democratic primary was split with Sen. Barack Obama winning the Iowa caucuses and Hillary Clinton pulling out a comeback victory in New Hampshire. The political tag team of Bill and Hillary Clinton felt secure about the South Carolina black vote because of President Clinton’s persistent high approval ratings among African-Americans, but they were about to get their first real taste of Sen. Obama’s Chicago-style political game. Sen. Obama and his team were able to take a couple of innocuous statements by the Clintons and twist them into a race related controversy.

It started when Hillary Clinton said to an interviewer on Fox News;

I would point to the fact that that Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when he was able to get through Congress something that President Kennedy was hopeful to do, the President before had not even tried, but it took a president to get it done.

That’s the complete quote but the New York Times ran no less than three separate stories that shortened it to;

“Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” Mrs. Clinton said in trying to make the case that her experience should mean more to voters than the uplifting words of Mr. Obama. “It took a president to get it done.”

They omitted Mrs. Clinton’s reference to JFK, which, combined with remarks from a Clinton supporter caused some initial drama with Ted Kennedy, who went  on to endorse Barack Obama. The Clintons were about to come down with a dose of press bias karma. On January 9, 2008 the New York Times editorial board set the race-baiting table.

Why Mrs. Clinton would compare herself to Mr. Johnson, who escalated the war in Vietnam into a generational disaster, was baffling enough. It was hard to escape the distasteful implication that a black man needed the help of a white man to effect change. She pulled herself back from the brink by later talking about the mistreatment and danger Dr. King faced. Former President Bill Clinton, who seems to forget he is not the one running, hurled himself over the edge on Monday with a bizarre and rambling attack on Mr. Obama.

A few days later, here’s Bob Herbert bringing the dessert, writing in his The New York Time column;

I could also sense how hard the Clinton camp was working to undermine Senator Obama’s main theme, that a campaign based on hope and healing could unify, rather than further polarize, the country.

So there was the former president chastising the press for the way it was covering the Obama campaign and saying of Mr. Obama’s effort: “The whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen.”

But – it wasn’t true. Watch Bill Clinton’s entire remarks and it’s 100% clear as to what he’s referring to as “the biggest fairy tale” and it’s not Obama’s candidacy. Nor is it the notion, as Herbert claims, that “a campaign based on hope and healing could unify.” No, the “fairy tale” is the idea that Obama was consistently opposed to the war in Iraq. Clinton points out speeches that Obama made and votes he cast as a Senator. His comments strike me as neither bizarre nor rambling, as the Times had claimed.

No matter. When Hillary Clinton appeared on Meet the Press just prior to the South Carolina primary, the late Tim Russert led with the race card attack against Clinton, including the quote from Herbert’s New York Times piece. Russert even plays a selectively edited clip of Clinton’s comments, where he cuts out every single part of what Clinton says leaving only ‘this whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen.”

Russert follows this butchered video clip with the quote from South Carolina Senator and Congressional Black Caucus member James Clyburn that had also appeared in the Times; “To call that dream a fairytale, which Bill Clinton seem to be doing, could very well be insulting to some of us.” Hillary Clinton tries to point out that Russert is not playing the entire clip, but he shuts her down and plays a quote from Donna Brazil expressing disappointment in Bill Clinton and his “tone.” Russert continues to filibuster relentlessly for a couple of minutes, quoting the New York Times

In their book Game Change, John Heilemann and Mark Halperin fill in some of the backstage detail.

A few days after New Hampshire, a memo surfaced, produced by Obama’s South Carolina operation, that grouped together MLK/LBJ and “fairytale” along with other race-freighted incidents — including Billy Shaheen’s and Penn’s invocations of Obama’s youthful cocaine use — to suggest that the Clintons were playing the race card. Then there was Illinois congressman and Obama campaign cochair Jesse Jackson, Jr., who went on MSNBC and noted that while Clinton had teared up in New Hampshire, she never cried over Hurricane Katrina. “Those tears also have to be analyzed,” Jackson said, “particularly as we head to South Carolina, where 45% of African-Americans will participate in the Democratic contest.”

To Bill, the picture was all too clear. By accusing him and Hillary of slapping the race card on the table, the Obama campaign was doing exactly that itself. And though it infuriated him, he couldn’t help but respect the artfulness of the play. The Obama’s were tough; they weren’t  just sitting back and letting the nomination slip away.

On Meet the Press, Clinton tries to take the high road against the charge, referring to Senator Obama as an extraordinary person and candidate. A few days later, Hillary Clinton was trounced in the South Carolina primary.

If that’s how the Obama campaign treated a fellow Democrat and “the first black president,” just imagine the GOP candidate — and the American people — are in store for come this fall.

But that describes a lot of people in Washington. I guess what also bothers me is his willingness to say anything, regardless of how divorced it is from reality, to advance his short-run political agenda (sort of a Democrat version of Karl Rove).

For example, here’s part of what the clownish Empire State  Senator recently had to say about fiscal policy, as reported by a Washington Post columnist.

Schumer said, “…Republicans came in and said, `We can solve your problem by shrinking government’…We tried their theory…The American people resent government paralysis, but most of them would say that government is doing too little to help them, not too much.”

What’s remarkable about this statement is that it’s so inaccurate that we can’t even decipher what he means. I’ve come up with three possible interpretations of what he might have been trying to say, and they’re all wrong.

1. He’s referring to GOP actions this year. This interpretation might make partial sense because the House Republicans have made a few semi-serious efforts to shrink government, but how can Schumer say “we tried their theory” when every Republican initiative was blocked by the Senate and Obama?

The Ryan budget died of malign neglect since the Senate didn’t even bother to produce a budget, and Republican efforts on the 2011 spending levels and the debt limit also were stymied, resulting at best in kiss-your-sister deals.

2. He’s referring to GOP actions during the Bush Administration. This interpretation might make some sense because the GOP did control the House, the Senate, and the Presidency, but does Schumer understand that “shrinking government” was not part of the Republican agenda during those years?

But don’t believe me. The numbers from the Historical Tables of the Budget unambiguously show that the federal budget almost doubled during the Bush years because of huge increases in domestic spending.

3. He’s referring to GOP actions during the 1990s. This interpretation actually does make sense because the burden of the public sector did shrink as a share of GDP during the Clinton years when Republicans controlled Congress, so it would be accurate to say “we tried their theory.”

But what was so bad about the era of spending restraint during the 1990s? The economy expanded and people were better off, in large part because, to quote Schumer, government was “doing too little to help them.”

Heck, the Clinton-GOP Congress years were so good that I even offered, during a debate on national TV, to go back to Clinton’s higher tax rates if it meant we also could undo all the reckless spending of the Bush-Obama years.

This doesn’t mean I’ve stopped caring about low marginal tax rates. It just means that I understand that the ultimate tax is the burden of the public sector. This video explains more, in case you’re wondering why I’d like to go back to the 1990s.

It goes without saying (but I’ll say it anyhow) that it would be even better to combine Clinton’s spending levels with Reagan’s tax rates.

The federal government has two types of debt public debt and intra-governmental debt.  Public debt is comprises securities held by investors outside the federal government, including that held by investors, the Federal Reserve System and foreign, state and local governments  Intra-governmental debt comprises Treasury securities held in accounts administered by the federal government, such as the Social Security Trust Fund.

Traditionally the annual federal government budget deficit or surplus is the cash difference between government receipts and spending, ignoring intra-governmental transfers. This is a trick as intra-governmental debt needs to be repaid just like the publicly held debt. This is also how Clinton claimed a surplus in three out of his last four years. (Source for all of the numbers below, US Treasury Direct).

These figures include the public debt but not the intra-governmental debt.  Its like paying off your American Express card while ignoring the fact that your Mastercard over the limit and months past due. Your Amex looks great but your budget is not balanced.

When the Treasury department reports the National Debt (now at $14.5 trillion) it counts both public and intra-governmental debt. Clinton’s first full budget proposal in 1993 took effect in October 1993 and concluded September 1994 (FY1994) and his last started in October 2000 and ended in September 2001. Using those bookends and subtracting each year’s national debt from prior years,  here’s the national debt at the end of each year of Clinton Budgets.

To be fair, Clinton’s FY 2000 budget came very close, it only added about $18 billion to the national debt, but in his last budget he was back up over $130 billion.

Despite what you may hear from Democrats on the campaign trail, there were no giant surpluses that Bush squandered (Bush did overspend, but there was no surplus to squander). The myth of Clinton balancing the budget and producing surpluses belongs with unicorns and and elves, in the realm of myths. The last president to preside over a balanced budget/surplus was Dwight Eisenhower, whose government saw surpluses of  approximately $2 billion dollars in 1956 and 57.

Neither Bill Clinton nor any Republicans deserve any credit for balancing the budget in the 1990s, because the budget was never balanced.

According to last week’s  New York Times, recent secret meetings with Wall Street executives inside the Obama White House are more than raising eyebrows:

A few weeks before announcing his re-election campaign, President Obama convened two dozen Wall Street executives, many of them longtime donors, in the White House’s Blue Room.…

The event, organized by the Democratic National Committee, kicked off an aggressive push by Mr. Obama to win back the allegiance of one of his most vital sources of campaign cash — in part by trying to convince Wall Street that his policies, far from undercutting the investor class, have helped bring banks and financial markets back to health.

Of course the Obama White House response was predictable: “Nothing to see here.” Politico reported White House Press spokesman Jay Carney told reporters aboard Air Force One, “What needs to be made clear is, contrary to suggestions otherwise, this was not a fundraiser.”

Really? Nothing wrong with the meeting? Then why was there no mention of it on the President’s public schedule?

“I’m not aware — I don’t remember. I actually wasn’t in this position,” Carney said defensively. (Actually, Politico notes Carney was in his position when the meetings took place. Carney came on board on February 16. The meetings were held on March 7.)

The parallels between the Obama Wall Street hustle and the Clintons’ infamous coffee klatches are way too obvious to ignore (even for the liberal press which has noted the similarities).

The Clinton White House was notorious for illegally using the White House facilities for political fundraising, from pimping out the Lincoln bedroom, to Al Gore’s calls to the Buddhist Monks, to the Clinton White House coffee meetings.

The Clinton’s held more than 90 White House coffees for about 1,000 major contributors back in 1995 and 1996, as just one component of their massive and corrupt campaign fundraising operation. Some Democratic fundraisers explicitly sold invitations for $50,000 to $100,000 to the coffees with the president, vice president and their respective wives. You can see Hillary Clinton’s involvement in these illegal coffees nicely documented in her own calendars here.

Former Judicial Watch client and former Clinton fundraiser Johnny Chung personally forked over a $50,000 check to then-First Lady Hillary Clinton’s Chief of Staff right on White House grounds. Of course, federal law prohibits fundraising activities on government property. But that didn’t stop the Clintons. (It never did.) Chung, incidentally, pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations and admitted that much of his largesse actually came from a Chinese military operative.

Now his cheerleading section in the press is quick to defend the president, saying that it is not yet known whether or not these Wall Street execs were expressly pumped for cash. But let’s be real about this. The president, through the DNC, didn’t invite his Wall Street friends over to the White House because he sincerely wanted their advice on the economy. No, the meetings and the president’s follow-up phone calls to those who could not attend had one purpose: To make his fundraising pitch. Even the liberal New York Times sees that.

If I’ve learned one thing about how Washington politicians operate, it is this: When politicians operate in secret, their intentions are less than upstanding. There is a reason why this meeting was conveniently “left off” Obama’s public schedule.

Of course, the Obama administration could erase all doubts about its intentions simply by keeping its promises on transparency. But this would require a major change in attitude and policy. Despite its protestations to the contrary, this administration remains secretive and hostile to the open records process, especially as it relates to the White House visitor logs. (See my recent congressional testimony on this point here.)

When he last ran for office, Barack Obama promised to rid the White House of special interests and lobbyists. Now he’s inviting them over for secret visits while withholding key records on who visits the White House and for what purpose.

But whatever details regarding these White House Wall Street meetings that remain obscured, this much we do know. Obama’s top fundraisers are rewarded with some pretty sweet jobs.

Again according to Politico:

More than two years after Obama took office vowing to banish “special interests” from his administration, nearly 200 of his biggest donors have landed plum government jobs and advisory posts, won federal contracts worth millions of dollars for their business interests or attended numerous elite White House meetings and social events, an investigation by iWatch News has found.

Carney’s response? The individuals hired by the Obama White House were highly qualified and just “happened to be donors.” Politico, highlighting reporting done by the Center for Public Integrity, reported that “80 percent of ‘bundlers’ who raised more than $500,000 for Obama’s campaign were given key administration posts.” That’s a pretty high rate of coincidence, wouldn’t you say?

Judicial Watch will not let these Chicago-style scandals sit and you can expect action on this from your watchdog in Washington in the coming weeks.

Our friend Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government broke the story of the New York Democrat congressman’s sending of unsolicited lewd photographs of himself to women on the Internet, and now it appears he was sending those pictures to underage girls. Weiner, who is married, spent a week lying (rather obviously) about his activities to the public, to his colleagues in Congress, and to virtually every major news outlet. This past Monday, he finally admitted his lies but said he would not resign from Congress. The Democrat leadership is horrified and trying to push him to resign. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi even requested an “ethics” investigation by the House Ethics Committee! Republicans, who have had more than their fair share of scandals, are happy to sit back and watch.

Most of you, Dear Readers, are not from Washington, so I won’t insult you by spending time explaining to you why Weiner should resign. Unfortunately, there is a certain amoral, cynical crowd that thinks no sexual misconduct (or related criminality) warrants resignation from public office. It used to be called the Clinton administration. It is no coincidence that Weiner is close to Clinton and that Weiner seems to consider Clinton his confessor. The Clinton example shows the way for Weiner. It also highlights the rank hypocrisy of liberals in Congress who are screaming for Weiner’s resignation when those same people applauded Bill Clinton on the day of his impeachment.

A president has an affair with a White House intern; “allegedly” sexually assaults a woman outside the Oval Office; is credibly accused of rape; hires investigators to intimidate witnesses; and lies to the American people, his cabinet, a federal court and grand jury, etc…that president didn’t resign. The Senate couldn’t even be bothered to remove him from office. Weiner must think, “If Clinton didn’t go, why should I?” Bill Clinton is an elder statesman in this corrupt city. His wife, who helped orchestrate the effort to destroy the women who were witnesses against him, is our pretender Secretary of State. The Clinton way is now the prevailing ethic for Washington, especially for liberal politicians. Weiner’s decision to try to ride out the scandal and remain in office is therefore no surprise. The term of office for too many elected officials is one long power trip. Ethics, morality, and respect for the rule of law barely register for politicians like Weiner.

This arrogance infects politicians of both political parties and every ideology. It is a sad sign of our times that the exceptions prove the rule when politicians like former New York Governor Elliot Spitzer resign in the face of scandal.

In the interest of full disclosure, you should know that Congressman Weiner’s office reached out to us a few weeks ago about legislation he had been pushing to combat government corruption. We had been working with his staff up until last week. Obviously, we have placed our work with his office on hold while we push for his resignation!

(And while Washington is focused on the sexual predations of a member of Congress, we should remind them of our recent lawsuit against Florida Democrat Congressman Alcee Hastings on behalf of Winsome Packer, a congressional employee. Her lawsuit alleges that Hastings repeatedly subjected her to “unwelcome sexual advances,” “unwelcome touching” and retaliation.)

What next for Weiner?

He may have resigned by the time you receive this.

Or, if the Clinton way works for him, he may be Senator from New York in six years.

In the meantime, let’s all do the obligatory work of eternally vigilant citizens and call our congressmen and let them know our opinion on Weiner. The Capitol switchboard is 202-224-3121. I assure you no call or letter to Congress is a wasted effort.

I’ve already explained that Bush was a statist rather than a conservative, and you can find additional commentary from me here, here, here, and here.

Simply stated, any President who doubles the burden of federal spending in just eight years is disqualified from being a conservative – unless the term is stripped of any meaning and conservatives no longer care about limited government and constitutional constraints on Washington.

But if you don’t want to read the blog posts I linked above, this chart should make clear that Bush was a big spender, not only when compared to Reagan, but also compared to Clinton. Moreover, we’re only looking at overall domestic spending, so this doesn’t include Iraq, Afghanistan, and other defense expenditures. And these are inflation-adjusted dollars, so we’re comparing apples to apples.

But let’s also examine the burden of domestic spending as a share of GDP. As you can see, there actually was progress during the Clinton years, and significant progress during the Reagan years. But all that was completely wiped out during the Bush presidency.

These numbers should not be a surprise. During Bush’s tenure, we got the no-bureaucrat-left-behind education bill, two corrupt farm bills, a new prescription drug entitlement, two pork-filled transportation bills, an auto company bailout, and a TARP bailout for banks.

This was a time of feasting for special interest groups and lobbyists, to put it mildly.

If that’s conservative, then Ronald Reagan was a liberal.

No matter what we find, this much I know: It should never have taken five years to obtain documents that were (a) 13-years-old at the time of our initial request and (b) were supremely relevant to the ongoing discussions regarding Obamacare.

We can speculate as to why the Bush administration would have refused to release the documents. Former President Bush demonstrated distaste for exposing the Clinton scandals from the get-go. Perhaps he feared retaliation by the Clinton smear machine. Or perhaps he simply wanted to move beyond the controversies of the past, as he publicly expressed. It was our experience that his administration was generally hostile to open records laws, which had the coincidental effect of helping protect him, the Clintons, and his father!

We can speculate as to why the Obama administration, the self-promoted “most transparent” administration in history, kept these documents secret until after Obamacare was signed into law. President Obama apparently wanted to avoid any comparisons between his healthcare reform initiative and that of the former First Lady, an unpopular boondoggle that nearly forced President Clinton from office. Oh, and he likely did not wish to embarrass his Secretary of State or Bill Clinton, a prolific influence peddler and money-man for the Democrats.

After all, the similarities between Hillarycare and Obamacare, both in terms of policy and in terms of execution, are many — which is not surprising, as both involve the socialist effort to have the government take over the health care industry.

July 2008, Judicial Watch did manage to force the release of some Clinton Presidential Library records related to Hillary Clinton’s healthcare campaign. (You can view them all here.) Certainly the Obama administration viewed the negative press coverage these documents earned as a threat to their drive for socialized medicine.

Check out the following excerpts from documents we uncovered and you’ll see what I mean.

• A June 18, 1993, internal Memorandum entitled, “A Critique of Our Plan,” authored by someone with the initials “P.S.,” makes the startling admission that critics of Hillary’s health care reform plan were correct: “I can think of parallels in wartime, but I have trouble coming up with a precedent in our peacetime history for such broad and centralized control over a sector of the economy…Is the public really ready for this?… none of us knows whether we can make it work well or at all…” (Some guessed that the author of this memo is Paul Starr, who served as head of Hillary’s Health Care Task Force staff.)

  Of course we now know President Obama took it a step further, sticking a provision into his law which mandates the American people must purchase healthcare insurance or be fined. This provision, which had no precedent in American history, was recently declared unconstitutional by a federal court in Florida and is headed for a showdown at the U.S. Supreme Court.

• A “Confidential” May 26, 1993, Memorandum from Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) to Hillary Clinton entitled, “Health Care Reform Communications,” which criticizes the Task Force as a “secret cabal of Washington policy ‘wonks’” that has engaged in “choking off information” from the public regarding health care reform. The memorandum suggests that Hillary Clinton “use classic opposition research” to attack those who were excluded by the Clinton Administration from Task Force deliberations and to “expose lifestyles, tactics and motives of lobbyists” in order to deflect criticism. Senator Rockefeller also suggested news organizations “are anxious and willing to receive guidance [from the Clinton Administration] on how to time and shape their [news] coverage.”Remember this promise by then-candidate Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign? “I’m going to have all the negotiations around a big table. We’ll have doctors and nurses and hospital administrators. Insurance companies, drug companies — they’ll get a seat at the table, they just won’t be able to buy every chair. But what we will do is, we’ll have the negotiations televised on C-SPAN, so that people can see who is making arguments on behalf of their constituents, and who are making arguments on behalf of the drug companies or the insurance companies.”Well that didn’t happen. Instead, the president crafted his plan in secret with liberals in Congress and Big Labor, and then managed to shove it through Congress over the vociferous opposition of the American people, but with the approval of the liberal allies in the Establishment Media. And he has stonewalled every FOIA request filed by Judicial Watch related to his Obamacare plan.
• A February 5, 1993, Draft Memorandum from Alexis Herman and Mike Lux detailing the Office of Public Liaison’s plan for the health care reform campaign. The memorandum notes the development of an “interest group data base” detailing whether organizations “support(ed) us in the election.” The database would also track personal information about interest group leaders, such as their home phone numbers, addresses, “biographies, analysis of credibility in the media, and known relationships with Congresspeople.”Didn’t the Obama administration get into hot water not too long ago for turning campaign supporters into snitches, asking them to report “fishy” emails regarding Obamacare to a White House email address? The obvious intent was to establish an enemies list of conservative activists to target.

Of course these similarities are not all that surprising considering the fact that Obama’s Chief of Staff at the time was former Clinton hack Rahm Emanuel (a.k.a. Rhambo). The only difference is that President Obama was ultimately successful in his attempt to install socialized medicine, although the Supreme Court will have the final say.

This battle over Hillarycare documents is an excellent case study on what is faced every single day in the attempt to bring transparency to the inner workings of government. The Obama White House, in particular, has demonstrated a deep disrespect for open records laws.