Hillary inviting Greenspan to her proposed pow wow on how to fix the economy is like inviting Hitler to a conference on the Holocaust. The only way it makes sense is if she's planning to have one of her Bosnian snipers blow his head off as he walks thru the door.

Bill Clinton gave us the best economy since WWII and Greenspan was there.

If by "best" you mean hemorrhaging manufacturing jobs, massive trade deficits and selling each other worthless stocks in gigantic pyramid schemes, then yes, I'd agree with that - it was the "best" economy since WWII, at least for speculators and frauds.

For people who actually do something productive and intrinsically worthwhile however, it wasn't so hot. Wages have been pretty much stagnant for decades now - prices have not. And we're in debt up to our eyeballs, at the personal, local, state and federal levels, with nonexistent savings rates.

Are you suggesting that Ronald Reagan's changes in politics and economics were good for the country and that Obama promises Reagan-like change?

If so, we are doomed, plain and simple.

I think we're more likely to be doomed if the average American is as obtuse as you seem to be.

What Mr. Leonard is suggesting is that effective leaders don't come to the fight armed with a cartload of specific proposals - Reagan certainly didn't, and whatever you think of the results of his policies, he was certainly effective in getting his vision implemented.

Effective leaders ensure that their ultimate goals are well defined and well communicated, then allow others to work out the specific steps which will be taken in order to achieve those goals. They're strategic thinkers.

Hillary is a pure tactician. That's fine for a Senator, where tactics are at least as important as strategy, but it's awful in a President. Our most successful Presidents in terms of implementing change have all been great strategic thinkers and effective communicators. And we certainly need to implement a lot of change if we're to get out of the mess we currently find ourselves in.

the hemorrhaging of jobs and deficits began under bush.

Wrong. It's been going on for years. A quick visit to the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that, just from the raw numbers:

Mfg

Employment 1/

Year (000)

1979 19,426

1980 18,733

1985 17,819

1990 17,695

1995 17,241

2000 17,263

2001 16,441

2002 15,259

2003 14,510

2004 14,329

2005 (1st Qtr) 14,258(p)

Keep in mind our population has grown substantially since 1979, so these numbers are even more alarming. They also don't reflect the quality of the jobs - we've traded a lot of heavy industry with highly-skilled, highly-paid labor for really low-skilled, low-paying jobs, like the assembly of manufactured components or frozen food factories (yes, Virginia, the cheeze poof factory workers who dump MSG into the bag are considered part of the "manufacturing" sector).

Trade deficit figures have been even more grim, for two decades now. So have personal, local, state and federal budget deficits, in spite of some accounting trickery and raiding the Social Security trust.

With all due respect, Reagan's vision and policies helped to get us into the mess we're in.

Didja see anybody praising Reagan's vision or his policies?

No.

But Reagan was effective at getting his vision implemented. The Democrats haven't run anyone that effective since FDR, which is why they've spent the better part of the last 25 years crying in the wilderness (or running Republican Lite candidates like Bill Clinton).

We already know how "effective" Hillary will be, based on her disastrous healtcare initiative in the 1990's, and based on how her well-financed, well-connected campaign imploded after being challenged by the junior senator from Illinois.

What? So it "began" in 1979 and you want to blame it on Bill Clinton and ignore the surplus and blame him for the negative personal savings and high personal debt among other things?

First of all, what surplus? The asset bubble Greenspan blew in the 1990's - along with a large tax increase and some budget cuts - lead to a brief period where the Federal government ran a small surplus. A surplus if you don't count all of the money we were borrowing from the Social Security trust. If you do, that surplus was about as real as the peak value of Pets.com stock.

At the same time, personal, local and state debt were all skyrocketing, as was the trade deficit - a trend Bush II has only accelerated by following economic policies similar to Clintons, only with more tax cuts for billionaires and more money for Halliburton. Real wages stagnated, failing to keep pace with the cost of living, especially for the middle class and the poor. The Clinton years were less-awful than Bush I or Bush II - this does not make them a great success. And they helped set the stage for the mess we're in today.

It's not fair to lay *all* of the blame for what's wrong with our economy today at Greenspan's feet. Clinton could have replaced him and didn't, in spite of numerous warnings from responsible economists and others. The Clinton Administration also pursued the strong dollar policy, which priced our exports out of many markets, artificially decreased the cost of imports and helped to decimate our manufacturing sector in the process, all to benefit well-connected financial scam artists like the clowns at Bear and Citibank. In addition to NAFTA and the China free trade agreements, the Clinton Administration also presided over the Enron fiasco, the cancerous growth of mortgage scam factories like Ameriquest and Countrywide, and the repeal of Depression-era economic regulations which had kept our economic growth stable and our population prosperous for more than a generation.

There's a lot of blame to go around for the mess we're in today, and thanks to the Clintons the Democrats deserve a large share of that blame. That's what you get for electing DINOs - Democrats In Name Only. The Clintons promoted Republican-lite policies, with predictable results.