By Mark Scott
Buffalo, NY – US Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has been attacking congressional Republicans pretty hard in recent weeks. During an appearance in the Buffalo area Monday, Clinton lambasted Republicans for their role in creating the problem-plagued Medicare prescription drug program.
Senator Clinton visited an Amherst pharmacy and didn't mince words when it comes to Medicare Part D.
"Like the handling of Katrina, the federal government's response has been slow, inept and dangerous," Clinton said.
But even that criticism doesn't close to her much publicized line from a Martin Luther King, Jr. Day speech in which she compared the running of the Republican Congress to the way slave owners once ran plantations. When asked about those comments Monday, Clinton did not shy away from them...
"I am deeply concerned at how Congress is being run. It's being run in a top-down, heavy-handed way," Clinton said. "The result is you get bills like this. I would just like to remind people that this Medicare prescription drug benefit was negotiated by a member of the House of Representatives, who after negotiating it, left to take a job with a pharmaceutical company."
Clinton said she's just sounding an alarm about what she sees as a disturbing trend in Washington. But political analysts say it's part of a Democratic strategy to turn the tide against Republicans in hopes that the party can take back the House and Senate in November's election. Canisius College Political Scientist Michael Haselswerdt says Clinton is responding to what she's seeing in the polls.
"What she's really trying to do is establish herself as the voice for the dissatisfaction with Republican government," Haselswerdt said. "We see that dissatisfaction in the polls. She's reading those. She wants to be the person who is articulating that dissatisfaction."
But Haselswerdt says there would need to be overwhelming dissatisfaction on the part of voters this year for Democrats to displace Republicans in either house.