Barack, the little s**t

Barack Obama's a little s**t.

It's a point Paul Krugman makes a lot more delicately as he regularly notes that Barack refuses to give Bill Clinton credit for anything in speech after speech. No where is that more evident than in his "15th Anniversy of FMLA" going into effect comments. Four paragraphs that never once mention Bill Clinton. "Fifteen years ago today," Barack's statement begins, "working families everywhere achieved a victory when the Family and Medical Leave Act went into effect." But not such a victory ("groundbreaking law, he later says) that it's important to note who signed into law apparently.



In 1992, Bill Clinton campaigned on the Family Medical Leave Act. Not only was it stressed in campaign stops, Putting People First (by "Gov. Bill Clinton & Sen. Al Gore") promised (page 101), "Sign into law the Family and Medical Leave Act, which George Bush vetoed in 1990, so that no worker is forced to choose between keeping his or her job and caring for a newborn child or sick family member." In his June 2nd Democratic Party primary victory speech, he spoke of women "who worry about how they can balance the demands of motherhood and work, how they can do right by their children. Well, I'll tell you one thing, if we had a President who would sign instead of veto the Family and Medical Leave Act, they'd be better off. And I'm going to give that to them." He returned to the topic in his DNC acceptance speech, noting of the first Bush, "He won't give mothers and fathers the timple chance to take some time off from work when a baby is born or a parent is sick, but I will." And Bill Clinton kept that promise and deserves credit for the Family Medical Leave Act.

Bill Clinton writes of it frequently in his book My Life such as on page 273, when he includes this while writing about the birth of his daughter Chelsea:

The Rose firm gave Hillary four months of paternal leave to get Chelsea off to a good start. Because I was the boss, I could control when I went to the office, so I arranged my work to be home a lot in those first few months. Hillary and I talked often about how fortunate we were to have that critical time to bond with Chelsea. Hillary told me that most other advanced countries provided paid paternal leave to all citizens, and we believed that other parents should have the same priceless opportunity we'd had. I thought about those first months with Chelsea in February 1993, when I signed my first bill into law as President, the Family and Medical Leave Act, which allows most American workers three months off when a baby is born or a family member is ill. By the time I left office, more than thirty-five million Americans had taken advantage of the law. People still come up to me, tell me their stories, and thank me for it.

Hillary Clinton also notes it frequently in her book Living History and we'll zoom in on this from page 383:

The first piece of legislation Bill signed into law in 1993 was the Family and Medical Leave Act, sponsored by Democratic Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, which allowed millions of working people to take up to twelve weeks of unpaid leave for family emergencies or to care for a family member who was sick, without fear of losing their jobs. Millions of Americans took advantage of the protections of the law and discovered the profound difference it made in their lives. A woman in Colorado wrote me that her husband had recently died of congestive heart failure after several years of illness. Under the Family and Medical Leave Act, she had been able to take time off from work to transport him to doctor appointments and hospital visits, and to comfort him at the end. She did not have to spend the critical last months of her husband's life worrying that she would not have a job after he died.

No credit to Bill for it from Barack. Yeah, Barack's a real little s**t.