Posted on 09/05/2003 5:03:40 AM PDT by kattracks
Continuing a month-long string of personal attacks on President Bush, New York Sen. Hillary Clinton is now accusing Bush of breaking a "president-to-president" promise she said the Republican made to keep the AmeriCorps program intact.
"I personally know that there is a tradition among presidents when they succeed one another," Sen. Clinton told AmeriCorps supporters Wednesday, in quotes reported late Thursday by the Associated Press.
"When my husband spoke with the present President Bush as they were changing the leadership of our country, the only thing my husband asked President Bush was to take care of AmeriCorps and national service," she claimed.
But so far, complained Clinton, "that promise - made and even mentioned in the State of the Union - has not been fulfilled."
Funding for AmeriCorps has been stalled in Congress, with Republicans resisting Democrat demands for an additional $100 million to meet the program's current expenses.
Though it was originally conceived as a domestic version of the Peace Corps, conservatives have long criticized AmeriCorps as a make-work jobs program that actually accomplishes very little.
In 1997, AmeriCorps became the subject of an independent counsel investigation targeting Clinton's longtime friend and supporter Eli Segal, whom Clinton appointed to run the group. Segal was cleared of any wrongdoing, but the Justice Department kept details of the investigation secret.
Sen. Clinton complained that while Bush says publicly that he supports AmeriCorps, he's done nothing to force congressional Republicans to keep funding intact.
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
I know it is crude and rude but I can't resist. Someone should pen an article headlined "Hillary: My Husband Broke Promise to my Bush
Sorry ... had to finish the rest of her quote ....
That is all he asked? I find that hard to believe! Why would AmeriCorps and national service be at the top of Clinton's requests?
just reading these words tells me she has no chance in politics.....tin ear
Truer words were never spoken.
Last week the president celebrated the fifth birthday of AmeriCorps. The program, initiated by Mr. Clinton, pays volunteers for performing some sort of community service. Only in our current stage of deterioration could Americans accept the concept of a "paid volunteer."
By Federal standards it’s a relatively small program, spending only $3 billion so far. But for the president, it is a bright jewel that fills him with pride. Says White House communications director Ann Lewis: "You can see how personally proud he is of the concept."
Clinton told 800 of the paid volunteers brought to the White House that "There is now no question that you are an indispensable force for change in America. After years of fights over funding and purpose and AmeriCorps, peace is breaking out all over Washington . . . you are breathing new life into our old, old democracy."
That the president of the United States doesn’t know our country is most definitely not a democracy is disturbing, but his ignorance of such things is hardly new. As long as he doesn’t do something absolutely dreadful – like misspelling potato, for example – the media will give him a pass.
But for Clinton to assert there’s no question of AmeriCorps’ indispensability is ludicrous. There are many questions that go unanswered.
First, a brief explanation of how AmeriCorps was advertised by Clinton and accomplices. The government would give your money to organizations that in turn would pay a stipend of from $7,640 to $15,280 a year to each volunteer. Health insurance and childcare were part of the package. Additionally, full-time participants also were eligible for a $4,725 voucher to go to college.
Congress was told that the total Federal cost would average less than $18,000 per volunteer, that 80 percent of those enrolling would complete the program, and that private donations would quickly become a major component of AmeriCorps.
Things didn’t exactly turn out that way. Cost per participant is more than $26,000. In some instances, it’s been more than $100,000. There’s a dropout rate of almost 40 percent and only half of those who complete the program ever use the education voucher.
And what of the sanguine prediction that private money would surge into the program? Only about 10 percent of program costs come from anywhere other than taxpayers.
OK, so AmeriCorps is pretty expensive. Maybe the money’s going to some really good places, though. That depends on what you consider really good places. Hundreds of thousands of dollars have gone to the AFL-CIO, which recently endorsed Albert Gore. Surely a coincidence.
AmeriCorps has paid volunteers to work against "three strikes and you’re out" crime legislation, participate in political demonstrations, and collect dues for leftist advocacy groups. More innocuous tasks have included babysitting, changing light bulbs in schools, and cutting weeds.
In Terre Haute, Indiana, AmeriCorps enrollees received service credit for going to church and attending practices for sports teams they were on. These activities were designated "community service."
The full wastefulness of the money tossed into AmeriCorps may never be known. Twice the accounting firm Arthur Andersen has attempted to audit the program’s financial records. Both times it was determined the books were unauditable and incomplete.
AmeriCorps can’t account for at least $38 million it had spent. That doesn’t include the partisan political activities in which enrollees have participated and other subsidies to leftist organizations.
David King of the Ohio-West Virginia YMCA issued a warning about AmeriCorps years ago. He noted, "The national service movement and the National Corporation (AmeriCorps’ parent entity) are not about encouraging volunteering or community service. The national service movement is about institutionalizing federal funding for national and community service. It is about changing the language and understanding of service to eliminate the words ‘cvolunteer’ and ‘community service’ and in their place implant the idea that service is something paid for by the government."
AmeriCorps, like all the other feel-good government programs that are in reality counterproductive, deserves to die. Most likely, however, it will celebrate many more birthdays and be considered one of the highlights of the Clinton administration. Not that there’s much competition.
Puh - leeeeeeze!
Yea, like former presidents shutting their huge pie holes during their successors term? Billy wont shut up and Hillary is in perpetual bitch mode... How are this white trash likable to people???
Why Shrillary....Have you loss weight???...only if you looked throught the wrong end of a telescope.
That would be "Thou Shalt Not Bad-Mouth Thy Successor". Try it on for size, Bill and Hill.
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