Hillary Clinton is comfortable around a system where powerful interest groups attempt to support their causes. Some of the causes are non-economic. The Planned Parenthood people push in one direction and the Right to Life people the opposite. The interest groups that bother people are the economic ones: Wall Street, the drug companies, Big Oil, etc.
Bernie Sanders is denouncing the system. Hillary Clinton is a very successful practitioner in the system. This is a tough situation for Hillary.
Marco Rubio has an escape hatch. He, like Hillary, is a practitioner in the system, but he is young, has less of a record, is nice looking, and he gets to distract people by focusing on the one thing that is a widespread applause line for Republicans: harsh accusations of Obama and Hillary.
Hillary's brand is her years of experience which means she is older, has a record, is no longer a young pretty face. And when she raises her voice I suspect it reminds some people of when they were in trouble with their mothers.
Hillary is fighting--and has long fought--for good progressive causes and she did it the way it is done. She allied with powerful friends. She got interest groups mobilized. She raised money. She found interest group friends and she found money friends. The system is unlovely. Trump and Sanders call it corrupt, but it is the system and the Supreme Court insists it is Constitutional, reasoning that it isn't corrupt.
She pitted business groups against each other, the insurance companies cancelling out the banks, the oil companies pushing against the coal companies. It allowed incremental change. She said she allied with them so she could fight for progressive causes, and that is her record, although Democrats are questioning it. Republicans don't question it. They see her as a warrior on the progressive left, a prodigious influence and money-raising dynamo, and their toughest most effective enemy.
If only Democrats listened to Republican speeches or Fox News, Hillary would be understood as a far-left crazy, just one tiny click to the right of Sanders, the Communist.
But one thing is undeniable--she got rich doing it. And she and Bill got comfortable enough around money they could raise it for the Clinton Foundation's good work. Alas, she does not live in a log cabin.
She pitted business groups against each other, the insurance companies cancelling out the banks, the oil companies pushing against the coal companies. It allowed incremental change. She said she allied with them so she could fight for progressive causes, and that is her record, although Democrats are questioning it. Republicans don't question it. They see her as a warrior on the progressive left, a prodigious influence and money-raising dynamo, and their toughest most effective enemy.
If only Democrats listened to Republican speeches or Fox News, Hillary would be understood as a far-left crazy, just one tiny click to the right of Sanders, the Communist.
But one thing is undeniable--she got rich doing it. And she and Bill got comfortable enough around money they could raise it for the Clinton Foundation's good work. Alas, she does not live in a log cabin.
That would be darned useful for her this year, pushing against Bernie.
It is a problem for her even as Trump flies in his jet.
No comments:
Post a Comment