Clinton vs. Obama: Legislative Accomplishments

By now you may have caught the viral video that the Clinton campaign is e-mailing around. It features a rather dumbfounded Obama surrogate Kirk Watson who cannot name a single legislative accomplishment for the guy he's on the air promoting.



That will go down in history as perhaps the single worst performance of spindom ever. But does Watson's ignorance prove Clinton and McCain's claim that Obama, unlike Hillary, is all talk and no walk? I thought this might be a good time to revive a piece I put up a while back comparing the legislative agendas of both Clinton and Obama in 2007. You can read the whole piece here, but the gist is that neither one has a whole lot of passed bills of real substance over which to gloat.
In part, that's because the Senate isn't designed to be a place where one or two stars get to have all the glory for passing signature bills. While we do have legislation that, in the end, is come to be known by the names of the Senators who sponsor it (McCain-Feingold, for instance), the more deliberative of our two legislative bodies shouldn't really be portrayed the way Mr. Matthews insists.

Does the lack of name-recognizable bills mean that either Clinton or Obama hasn't done good work on behalf of the country? Not at all. As I've said many times before, their priorities and voting records are strikingly similar. And while Clinton would like you to think that her résumé vis-a-vis signature legislation is much more substantial than Obama's, the truth states otherwise.