The Washington Free Beacon reports on the private papers of Hillary Clinton’s now deceased Arkansas friend Diane Blair, whose files were made public at the University of Arkansas library. During the 2008 campaign, questions were raised regarding the decision to delay making Blair’s collection public until after the 2008 election. Among the top finding from the Blair documents were:
Hillary Clinton attempted to pass her own health care legislation in 1993 through the budget reconciliation process to avoid a Senate filibuster, just as the final Obamacare bill was passed through the Senate:
March 9 – HC absolutely exhausted after another day on the Hill. She’s working hard to get Byrd to let them put health care into budget reconciliation.
According to a polling memo from Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign in 1992, voters found Hillary Clinton to be “ruthless”:
On May 12, 1992, Stan Greenberg and Celinda Lake, top pollsters for Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign, issued a confidential memo. The memo’s subject was “Research on Hillary Clinton.”
Voters admired the strength of the Arkansas first couple, the pollsters wrote. However, “they also fear that only someone too politically ambitious, too strong, and too ruthless could survive such controversy so well.”
Their conclusion: “What voters find slick in Bill Clinton, they find ruthless in Hillary.”
Hillary Clinton originally called a single-payer health care system a necessity, a position she later denied ever having:
“At dinner, [Hillary] to [Bill] at length on the complexities of health care-thinks managed competition a crock; single-payer necessary; maybe add to Medicare,” Blair wrote.
The account is at odds with public statements by the former First Lady that she never supported the single-payer option.
In an interview with the New York Times as she ran for president in 2008, Hillary Clinton said she had never seriously considered adopting a single-payer system, in which the government, using funds appropriated from taxpayers, pays for all health care expenses.
The papers portray “a cutthroat strategist who relished revenge against her adversaries and complained in private that nobody in the White House was “tough and mean enough”:
The records paint a complex portrait of Hillary Clinton, revealing her to be a loyal friend, devoted mother, and a cutthroat strategist who relished revenge against her adversaries and complained in private that nobody in the White House was “tough and mean enough.”
Read more on the Blair papers here.