Clinton Takes Oath of Office
Posted on February 2, 2012
(January 3, 2017) Hillary Clinton today became the first female President of the United States, as she took the Oath of Office on the West Front of the Capitol.
Clinton promised to build a village for the American people, because as she put it, “it takes a village to raise a child.”
The former First Lady, Senator and Secretary of State survived a difficult primary and a brutal Presidential campaign, which included a Fox News expose of her husband’s marital affairs.
The expose became a mini-series on the Fox Business Channel, boosting ratings for the network and creating new legal challenges about some of the material that ran afoul of the FCC’s indecency standards.
Clinton takes the reigns from Mitt Romney, who lost in his bid for re-election.
Romney’s four-year reign was marked by remarkable economic progress, but dogged by a series of verbal blunders kept him on the defensive throughout his tenure.
The signature accomplishment of the Romney campaign was the historic Tax Reform Act of 2013. The Act created two flat rates of 20% and 10%, and equalized the treatment of all incomes.
Because of the simplicity of the tax reform law, revenues flooded into the Treasury, and Romney was able to balance the budget in three years. Because of his passion for rooting out waste, fraud and abuse, the former President was able to find almost a trillion dollars of cuts to the budget over the first two years.
But despite his economic success, Romney could never quite connect with the voters. His gaffes were legendary. During the last debate with Hillary Clinton, he offered to bet her three million dollars over a dispute about whose plan was better, Romneycare or Hillary health care. He said in a speech to financial supporters that Boston isn’t much of a college town. He said in an interview that he couldn’t understand why the poor just didn’t look for work on their laptops.
Clinton’s first job will be to repair the breach with former President Barack Obama. Obama, upset by the tough tactics used by Clinton’s campaign manager, refused to endorse the former First Lady in the campaign. Breaking with tradition, he also refused to attend her swearing in today.