Hillary Clinton does that thing politicians do. OMG she must be disrespecting Obama!

Image via WikiHow.

Weird spinning at The Hill:

Hillary Clinton is making the case that she’ll be able to get more done with Congress than her rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination — and President Obama, for that matter. 

That's paragraph 1, but actually she isn't, as we see in paragraph 9:

In an interview with NBC’s Chuck Todd, Clinton stopped short of saying that she’d have better relationships with Congress than Obama.

She didn't "stop short" of it, she was headed in a different direction. Like she went from San Francisco to Los Angeles but stopped short of going to Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. It's The Hill projecting that on her, with the aid of some experts, who happen to be former senator Trent Lott (R-MS):

“Obama doesn’t like to deal with the Congress and he won’t invite them up and he won’t come up here really visibly.... He apparently doesn’t respect the institution and the role that they play,” Lott said of Obama. “I think Hillary, I’m not going to be for her, but I think she would be much better about reaching out and actually trying to work with the Congress.”

Nobody else quoted in this story, Hillary Clinton in particular, mentions Obama at all.

What she was doing on the Chuck Todd show was, suitably for the Chuck Todd show, the most boring and predictable of campaign bromide for any Democratic candidate who has ever been in the Senate, talking about how her history in the Senate has uniquely enabled her to work with Republicans, since she got stuff done in the past with Sam Brownback and Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. Just as Bernie Sanders doesn't mind pointing out how well he has played with Sessions and with John McCain.

Exactly the way, in fact, young Barack Obama in 2008 touted his cooperation with Richard Lugar and the vile worm Tom Coburn (as well as his history of doing the same kind of thing in the Illinois State Senate).

No, it didn't work out very well for President Obama, and there's no reason to think it will work out much better for President Sanders or President Clinton, but that's what they do. The Hill is playing middle-school mean girl in the playground here, hoping to start a fight, for clicks. Funnily enough, as we learned from Driftglass yesterday, Sanders really did call out Obama on the issue, with a much better argument than the one Clinton would have been making if she had been making one, which she wasn't: complaining—I mean Bernie was complaining—that Obama has been overly anxious to cooperate with congressional Republicans:

“He thought he could walk into Capitol Hill and the Oval Office and sit down with John Boehner and Mitch McConnell and the Republicans and say, ‘I can’t get it all. You can’t get it all. Let’s work out something that’s reasonable,’ because he’s a reasonable guy.” 

But The Hill's too proud to notice that stuff.