Clinton Channels Warren -Updates Obamanomics with a Harder Populist Edge.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/clinton-channels-warren-1434320629
“Mrs. Clinton’s speech should bust any remaining illusions that she will return her party to her husband’s 1990s centrism. She is running as an Obama-Warren Democrat, which means that is also how she would govern.”
Any doubt about Hillary Clinton’s campaign strategy was put to rest on Saturday when she re-launched her presidential bid with a speech that Elizabeth Warren might have given. The former Secretary of State is running to the left even of President Obama, embracing Mr. Obama’s identity politics of race, sex and class but adding Senator Warren’s economic themes.
“The financial industry and many multinational corporations have created huge wealth for a few by focusing too much on short-term profit and too little on long-term value—too much on complex trading schemes and stock buybacks, too little on investments in new businesses, jobs and fair compensation,” she said on Roosevelt Island in New York City.
So here is Mrs. Clinton’s answer to the dilemma that any Democrat faces after the Obama Presidency: How do you explain seven years of historically slow economic growth and stagnant incomes?
One answer would be to return to her husband’s economic pragmatism, but that would put Mrs. Clinton at odds with most of today’s Democratic Party. So she’s going for the Warren-Obama strategy of blaming economic underperformance on the wealthy, big business, Wall Street and the Republican Party.
Her economic narrative deserves to be quoted at length. “We’re still working our way back from a crisis that happened because time-tested values were replaced by false promises,” she said. “Instead of an economy built by every American, for every American, we were told that if we let those at the top pay lower taxes and bend the rules, their success would trickle down to everyone else.
“What happened? Well, instead of a balanced budget with surpluses that could have eventually paid off our national debt, the Republicans twice cut taxes for the wealthiest, borrowed money from other countries to pay for two wars, and family incomes dropped. You know where we ended up.”
This conveniently ignores that the prosperity her husband presided over followed the election of a GOP Congress and the “trickle down” policy of a tax cut on capital gains in 1997; that Wall Street and business are operating under the rules that Democrats wrote; and that the lack of business investment and slow growth have coincided with the economic policies of the Obama era. As the candidate who lived on speaking fees from Goldman Sachs and foundation donations from Qatar, she may also be the least credible populist in history.
But that doesn’t mean her false narrative can’t prevail—and it will if the Republican nominee fails to offer an alternative economic explanation for the financial crisis and its aftermath. Mitt Romney never offered that narrative in 2012, so Mr. Obama got away with claiming he had saved the country from GOP policies and needed more time to make a full recovery. Mrs. Clinton is updating Mr. Obama’s argument to account for four more years of wage stagnation and with a harder populist edge.
Mrs. Clinton promised to lay out policies consistent with this theme in the coming weeks, but the speech included enough to suggest more of the Obama agenda of expanded government: universal pre-school, mandated family leave, “additional fees and royalties from fossil fuel extraction,” essentially free student loans, and so on.
She did make a bow toward “reforming our government” near the end of her 40-minute remarks, but her emphasis wasn’t on fixing programs that don’t work or aren’t affordable. Instead she attacked “the endless flow of secret, unaccountable money that is distorting our elections,” another bow to Ms. Warren.
Mrs. Clinton’s speech should bust any remaining illusions that she will return her party to her husband’s 1990s centrism. She is running as an Obama-Warren Democrat, which means that is also how she would govern.
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