New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait lays out how, in just 6 short years, likely-2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton went from being an economic populist looking out for the working class to Marie Antoinette.
It was, Chait writes, “Hillary Clinton who quaffed beers with white working-class Democrats in her 2008 campaign against the abstract, yuppified idealism of Barack Obama. And it was Bill Clinton who, in a 2012 Democratic National Convention speech, folksily explained the party’s economic philosophy more concretely than Obama himself had ever managed.”
So what happened?
Chait breaks it down into 7 points, some of them in defense of Clinton. But there’s no question that a number of unforced personal and political errors, coupled with the Democrat Party’s hard turn left, have left Hillary vulnerable to the Plutocrat charge.
In summary…
1. Hillary and Bill not putting action behind their rhetoric. While both claim to be in favor of increasing the Estate (or Death) Tax, both have engaged in the kind of estate planning that allows them to avoid estate taxes.
2. Hillary’s shockingly dishonest and disingenuous statement about being “dead broke” when she and Bill left the White House. That kind of talk not only portrays Hillary as out of touch, it is also a reminder that her lack of political skills had a lot to do with her epic loss to Obama in 2008.
3. The Clintons “buckraking” to the tune of $100 million after leaving office, that included attaching themselves to those Chait describes as “quite venal.”
4. The spectre of Elizabeth Warren looms, and next to Warren, Bill and Hillary look as corporatist, Wall Street-friendly, and out of touch as, well, Barack Obama.
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Chait isn’t wrong but he is missing one important factor: The mainstream media want Elizabeth Warren to run, which is why they are giving Hillary such a hard time. For now at least, the media have turned against Hillary in the same way they did Romney. It was more intense and dishonest with Romney, but the media’s goal is the same: prep the battlefield to put a hardcore Statist in office.
Should Warren become a pipe dream if and when it becomes clear Clinton will win the nomination, the media will immediately cease vetting and holding her accountable for everything. The celebration of The Woman will begin and the media will allow Hillary to be whatever she needs to be to defeat the evil sexist Republican.
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