[malia]

Douglas Brinkley...... "I don't think bill clinton ever reached that category".

"One, it's hard if you're not a wartime president"

Note to Douglas Brinkley (NTDB):
clinton WAS a wartime president. The problem is, he surrendered.

Preemptively.

You might say the clinton approach to The War on Terror was the perverse obverse of The Bush Doctrine.

"or have some huge event".

NTDB: clinton had one almost immediately, which he summarily ignored, the first attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor, the 1993 WTC bombing.

Do you recall that he urged us to ignore the bombing, too? Ignore the first major Islamofascist terrorist attack on the continental United States?!

Did you know clinton never visited the site? (And he was only 15 minutes away mere days after the bombing. He chose, instead, to give some forgettable speech on --what else? -- the economy.)

[Mia T]

Thanks, Malia.
Your post alerted me to the fact that
unless you play the video clip of clinton and Douglas Brinkley,
it 's a bit unclear who's saying all that.
So I added the attribution to each section of the quote
before posting it on the new clinton legacy page of deletehillary.com.

The term "great" is probably an overused term. There are only a few presidents who make that top tier: Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Franklin Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Thomas Jefferson, and a few others who might be there.

I don't think bill clinton ever reached that category.

One, it's hard if you're not a wartime president

Douglas Brinkley
Nov. 12, 2005
History News Network
Refuting clinton's Hofstra-apologia "Brinkley" lie

Note to Douglas Brinkley:
clinton WAS a wartime president. The problem is, he surrendered.

Preemptively.

You might say the clinton approach to The War on Terror was the perverse obverse of The Bush Doctrine.

or have some huge event.

Douglas Brinkley
ibid.

Note to Douglas Brinkley:
clinton had one almost immediately, which he summarily ignored, the first attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor, the 1993 WTC bombing.

Do you recall that he urged us to ignore the bombing, too? Ignore the first major Islamofascist terrorist attack on the continental United States?!

Did you know clinton never visited the site? (And he was only 15 minutes away mere days after the bombing. He chose, instead, to give some forgettable speech on --what else? -- the economy.)

 

Second, clinton is not known for something like Lyndon Johnson was -- The Civil Rights Act -- or even Theodore Roosevelt and conservation, or one big thing.

I think his successes were in welfare reform, economic discipline,trade pacts.

Douglas Brinkley
ibid.

Note to Douglas Brinkley:
Arguable. He was dragged kicking and screaming by the Republicans.

Those are achievements, but they're hard to get people queuing up a hundred years from now excited to see the "NAFTA Pen Under Glass."

Douglas Brinkley
ibid.

Note to Douglas Brinkley:
Great turn of phrase.