Day By Day© by Chris Muir.

January 27, 2007

Say NO to Hillary: Reason 1

From Unlimited Access (copyright 1996) by Gary Aldrich, chapter six, page 87:

Early in the Clinton Administration, the media was full of stories about FOBs -- "Friends of Bill." But many of the appointees I investigated were really FOHs -- Friends of Hillary. Nowhere were her thumbprints more pronounced than on the Health Care Task Force -- the most important domestic project of President Clinton's first term.

The health care debate looked very different inside the White House than it did to the public. While the public was inundated with hard-luck stories of suffering poor people who had lost their insurance, the Clintons themselves were behaving like the most cutthroat corporate downsizers.

In an effort to make good on candidate Clinton's promise to cut the White House staff by 25 percent -- a target the administration never reached -- many longtime federal employees were fired. To staff the White House, the administration brought in a flood of interns and volunteers who worked not only without insurance, but also without pay (and frequently without professional standards of behavior).

Kept very quiet by the Clintons was the fact that many White House employees were hired as officially "part-time" staff to be paid at only thirty-nine hours a week or less, even though there was plenty of work for them to do and they wanted to work full time. But denying them that extra hour of work a week allowed the White House to deny them a variety of benefits, the chief of which was health insurance!