En route from Tampa on Wednesday,
“I certainly intend to reach out to Republicans and Independents, the elected leadership of the Congress, which you mentioned,” she told reporters on her campaign plane as it returned to New York after a two-day campaign stretch in Florida. “I’m going to be doing everything I can to reach out to people who didn’t vote for me because I want to be president for everybody and I think that’s going to require a lot of effort on my part to demonstrate my commitment to that. And I intend to do as much of it as I possibly can before the inauguration and afterwards."
Biden says that during the transition, he was warned not to expect any cooperation on many votes. “I spoke to seven different Republican Senators, who said, `Joe, I’m not going to be able to help you on anything,’ he recalls. His informants said [Senate Minority Leader Mitch] McConnell had demanded unified resistance. “The way it was characterized to me was: `For the next two years, we can’t let you succeed in anything. That’s our ticket to coming back,’” Biden says.
The vice president says he hasn’t even told Obama who his sources were, but Bob Bennett of Utah and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania both confirmed they had conversations with Biden along these lines.
She may now be reaching across the aisle to appeal to independent voters, but Hillary Clinton currently believes she can succeed where the guy who once declared "There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America" failed.
Good luck with that.
But don't take it from me. "I promise you that we will be united against any Supreme Court nominee that Hillary Clinton, if she were president," would put up," Arizona senator John McCain informed a Philadelphia radio audience on October 17 before adding "I promise you. This is where we need the majority."
The unpredictable McCain could have been talking out of turn, going rogue. Apparently not, however. Nine days later, House Oversight committee chairperson Jason Chafetz told The Washington Post “Even before we get to Day One, we’ve got two years’ worth of material already lined up. She has four years of history at the State Department, and it ain’t good.”
While campaigning Wednesday for a Senate candidate in Colorado, Senator Ted Cruz remarked "There will be plenty of time for debate on that issue ... There is certainly long historical precedent for a Supreme Court with fewer justices. I would note, just recently, that Justice [Stephen] Breyer observed that the vacancy is not impacting the ability of the court to do its job. That’s a debate that we are going to have." The same day, a Federalist and CATO Institute fellow wrote "if Hillary Clinton is president it would be completely decent, honorable, and in keeping with the Senate’s constitutional duty to vote against essentially every judicial nominee she names."
The GOP has thrown down the gauntlet; Hillary Clinton has responded with an olive branch. It (seemingly) took President Obama nearly eight years to understand, as he recently noted, "The problem is that they’ve been riding this tiger for a long time. They’ve been feeding their base all kinds of crazy for years, primarily for political expedience."
Hounded by Republicans for a couple of decades and witness to the disease infecting their Party for the last eight years, Hillary Clinton should understand this. And she should realize it was not only because Barack Obama is black, and she will be unable to tame a Republican unable and unwilling to stand up to its popular or donor base. Mrs. Clinton's kind words for Republicans- minus Donald Trump- all during this campaign may be only political posturing. If not, President Clinton is in for a rude awakening.
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