What's Wrong with Hillary?

As Panic Grips Clinton Campaign, The Real Question: What's Wrong with Hillary?

On the Democratic candidates and the credibility gap

by Robert Borosage

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/01/21/panic-grips-clinton-campaign-real-question-whats-wrong-hillary

Panic now grips the Clinton campaign. Polls show Bernie Sanders surging to a dramatic lead in New Hampshire and closing in Iowa. The Washington Post reports that Hillary's national numbers are dropping faster now than they did in 2008. The Clinton campaign has started throwing everything and the kitchen sink at Sanders, with the gutter award captured, thus far, by Senator Claire McCaskill who smeared him with the "hammer and sickle," transparently attributing the red-baiting to future Republican attacks of her own imagination.

But the question isn't what's wrong with Bernie -- he's soaring beyond all expectations. The question is what's wrong with Hillary? She has universal name recognition, unparalleled experience, the support of the big money and the political gatekeepers, the Hollywood glitz, the best political operatives, the pollsters, the ad makers, the establishment policy mavens, and political press coverage. Having learned from 2008, she's got the best ground operation in the history of Iowa caucuses that still may rescue her there. But she's sinking rapidly against a 73-year-old political maverick who is still just introducing himself to the American people.

"What is plaguing the Clinton campaign are less the sins of the past than the strategic choices of the present -- particularly her decision to be the candidate of big money."

Already the inevitable Clinton circular firing squad has begun firing its salvos: We should have gone negative on Bernie earlier. We should have used Bill more... or less. We shouldn't have bet the house on the first four primaries. Woulda, shoulda, coulda.

Inevitably, any Clinton campaign carries a lot of baggage that simply has to be overcome. The assaults on her won't really be unleashed until the general election (although Donald Trump and Republican legislators have already started). What is plaguing the Clinton campaign are less the sins of the past than the strategic choices of the present -- particularly her decision to be the candidate of big money.

Hillary's Unilateral Disarmament

From its start, the Clinton campaign has boasted about its unparalleled fundraising capacity. HRC geared up a bevy of SuperPacs and C4s to take big donations and dark money. She launched a relentless operation to get wealthy donors to max out both for the primary and the general. Her ability to raise money helped scare away other potential contenders. Her continued commitment to this path is symbolized by the $33,400 a plate dinner Warren Buffet is hosting for her in Washington, D.C. on the eve of the Iowa caucuses. People who can afford $33,400 for one seat at the table aren't exactly the working people Hillary claims to champion.

Sanders, of course, made a different decision. He has condemned SuperPacs, big money and secret contributions. He has funded his campaign with record numbers of small donations raised largely over the social media. He doesn't have anything like a traditional campaign fundraising operation. That independence gives both force and integrity to his core message that it is time to take back our democracy from the "billionaire class," the entrenched interests, and the Wall Street banksters.

Clinton argues that she favors fundamental campaign finance reform, but she can't "unilaterally disarm." Deep pocket Republicans are amassing huge war chests to assault her. She has to be armed with big money to defend herself.

But in doing so, Clinton "unilaterally disarmed" her own credibility. The Clinton family foundation and the family fortune have been built with large contributions and lavish "speaking fees," significantly from the biggest financial interests in the country. Wall Street made Hillary herself a millionaire, as she pocketed over $3 million in speaking fees from Wall Street finance houses in 2013. She made nearly as much ($2.8 million) speaking to health care industry interests. And now her campaign is raising big bucks from the same folks.

The result is corrosive. When Clinton insists that her Wall Street reforms are far tougher than those of Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley, it rings false. She attacks Sanders for supporting Medicare for All which naturally is the bête noire of the private health insurance and drug companies.

"When Clinton insists that her Wall Street reforms are far tougher than those of Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley, it rings false. She attacks Sanders for supporting Medicare for All which naturally is the bête noire of the private health insurance and drug companies."

When Sanders invoked the $600,000 Clinton received from Goldman Sachs alone in speaking fees (a bank that just agreed to pay $5 billion essentially for mortgage fraud) in the last debate, her only defense was to suggest that a similar criticism would apply to Barack Obama who also raised money from Wall Street. Democrats like President Obama, but the defense is pretty lame given that fact that he will leave office with the big banks bigger and more concentrated than they were when their excesses blew up the economy, and with no major banker going to jail for what the FBI describes as an "epidemic of fraud."

Moreover, Sanders has demonstrated that it is possible to generate enough true popular excitement to raise enough money from small donations to be financially competitive at a presidential level. He didn't "unilaterally disarm;" he armed himself in a manner consistent with his program. And every attack by the Clinton camp only rouses his committed and growing army of small donors to ante up again.

In the general election, this might not matter as much. Every Republican -- except Donald Trump, the self-funding billionaire -- is enmeshed in the same pursuit of big money. But in the primary, as Clinton protests angrily that she is a true progressive reformer, her words lack conviction not because of Sanders' mild criticisms but because she has unilaterally disarmed her own credibility.

Credibility and Electability

In his brilliant new book, America Ascendent, Stanley Greenberg, the opinion analyst who helped Bill Clinton win in 1992, maintains that credibility on political reform is a big deal, not a side note.

Greenberg has tracked the emerging majority that Obama helped forge of the young, single women, and people of color whom he projects will constitute a majority of the electorate in 2016. These voters are looking for change. They fare among the worst in the modern economy and are the most supportive of the activist government and progressive reforms championed by Bernie Sanders and, yes, by Hillary Clinton. (Note their rankings on the CAF Candidate Scorecard)

But, Greenberg argues, these voters are the most skeptical of whether government will serve them in the end. They understand that the rich and powerful have rigged the rules, that when money talks, politicians listen. Corruption isn't a bug, it's a feature of our big money politics.

Greenberg's polling for Women's Voices, Women's Vote and other groups suggest that before they give a reform agenda a hearing, these voters must see a candidate who is credibly committed to political reform -- to curbing big money in politics, to cleaning out the stables in Washington, to making government serve the many and not just the wealthy and wired few. As Greenberg concludes, "When voters hear the [political] reform narrative first, they are dramatically more open to the middle-class economic narrative that calls for government activism in response to America's problems."

This helps explain the remarkable excitement that Sanders has generated among the young. He passionately champions popular big reforms -- tuition free college, a $15 minimum wage, Medicare for all, a bold climate change agenda, breaking up the big banks and more. And his integrity and credibility are affirmed by his commitment to funding his campaign with the support of millions of citizens, not the big money of special interests.

As Greg Sargent of the Washington Post notes, Hillary's credibility gulf also undermines her argument about "electability." Democrats have a natural majority among the electorate, but only if they turn out. Even the Clinton campaign has been worried about whether HRC can generate the excitement among the rising American electorate to get them to the polls. Now, they worry about whether Sanders will generate so much excitement that he will flood the Iowa caucuses and primaries with a wave of new voters.

Hillary Clinton is a formidable candidate who has assembled a strong campaign. She will remain formidable even if Sanders exceeds expectations by doing well in Iowa and winning in New Hampshire. The panic among her supporters is both unseemly and excessive. Claire McCaskill and the rest of the hit squad would be well advised to listen to the advice Campaign Chair John Podesta offered to David Brock, head of one of the Clinton SuperPacs, and "chill out." Clinton's difficulties stem not from the attacks of Sanders -- the most courtly of opponents -- but from her own revealing choices.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Robert L. Borosage is the founder and president of the Institute for America’s Future and co-director of its sister organization, the Campaign for America’s Future

Hillary is betting liberals are too dumb to see her for what she really is.

Hillary Clinton and the Northern Strategy

by Steve Hendricks

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/01/22/hillary-clinton-and-the-northern-strategy/

For decades now, we liberals have been shaking our heads in wonder at the working stiffs who give the rich pashas atop the GOP their votes. There’s hardly a liberal alive who can’t recite what’s the matter with Kansas: the parable of the downtrodden whites in their double-wides, so enraged by their dwindling slice of the American pie that they vote for hucksters who vow to keep Negro hands off their lily white daughters, homosexual hands off their wedding cakes, Mexican-rapist hands off their orchards, atheist hands off their crèches, guvmint hands off their assault weapons. The hucksters, with the votes in hand, go off to D.C. and sock it to the suckers who sent them there—shipping their jobs abroad, rigging the tax code against them, gutting their schools, taking swipes at their Social Security and Medicare. It’s not that the con men don’t throw the rubes some nourishing scraps. They block a bill to register firearms here, pass a Defense of Marriage Act there, decry the War on Christmas with their fellow shriekers on Fox. Donald John Trump is just the latest in a long parade of flimflammers to adopt the Southern Strategy. His only innovations are speaking bluntly rather than in code and cranking up the volume. It’s a pitiful farce, no?

But here’s an equally pathetic farce you don’t hear about much: Democrats are just as conned, only in politer tones. Ask a group of liberals what they want in a candidate, and you’ll get a sketch of a champion who will fight for income equality, rein in big banks, defeat ruinous trade agreements, restore our battered civil liberties, look to diplomacy before war, and stop the devastation of our climate. Sure enough, in every election year Democratic candidates come along peddling such wares as these, and the winners go off to D.C. and sock it to the suckers who sent them—shipping their jobs abroad with NAFTA and TPP, deregulating the banks that are screwing them, gutting welfare, ignoring calls for a living wage, logging old-growth forests, drilling the Arctic, spying home and abroad with abandon, beating back calls for universal healthcare, canning whistleblowers, fighting endless wars, torturing prisoners, and much, much more. Like the Republican con men, their Democratic counterparts will defend the worst assaults on Roe v. Wade (and avert their eyes as the states whittle Roe to nothingness—parental notification, anyone? waiting periods? admitting privileges?), will pass a family medical leave bill (unpaid, naturally, and applying only to businesses with 50 or more employees), will make the most token of gestures against global warming (must “nonbinding” precede every international “agreement”?)—in a word, scraps. This program, like the beast, goes by many names: triangulation, the Third Way, “reaching across the aisle,” “getting things done.” But its true name should be the Northern Strategy, for it’s the Dems’ own version of the Southern. Any leftist who wonders why her voice isn’t heard in Washington shouldn’t be asking what’s the matter with Kansas. She should be asking what’s the matter with New York.

And at this particular moment, there’s something particularly the matter with New York—and Massachusetts and Pennsylvania and Florida—that’s worth asking about: why are so many liberals lining up to buy the same snake oil in 2016 that they’ve bought since at least 1992? This time around the shyster hawking it is the Northern Strategist par excellence, a scammer who has been exposed time and again for the Tory wolf in Labor clothing that she is. I speak, of course, of the Hon. Hillary Rodham Clinton. In this respect at least, she is little better than a Trump (or Ryan or McConnell or any of the GOP big men). She is quieter, to be sure, but the same in dangling tempting bait while pursuing another, under-the-radar agenda utterly at odds with the voters she is duping.

So often has Clinton’s faux liberalism been laid bare that I hesitate to do it again. But her poll numbers, although delightfully dropping, show a great mass of the Democratic base are still being gulled. So here’s a précis of Hillary’s more egregious frauds, a veritable case study in how to work the Northern Strategy:

She bills herself a champion of Main Street over Wall Street, but she has been a lackey of Wall Street her entire political life.

Candidate Clinton has put forward what she calls a bold plan to reform the excesses of Wall Street, including a tax on high-frequency trading. Just one problem: “her proposal is very narrowly targeted to one specific practice, in which a trading computer tells a marketplace that it’s going to make a large number of trades but then cancels them before they go through,” writes Alan Pyke at ThinkProgess. “All other forms of HFT would be free to continue as normal under the proposal.” Only a dupe would have expected otherwise. Clinton’s Wall Street record has been littered, in and out of the Senate, with such gems as refusing to reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act (whose elimination contributed mightily to the crash of 2008 and our current Great Recession), rebuffing calls to break up big banks, and helping big banks screw their customers by making it ridiculously hard to declare bankruptcy and renegotiate crushing credit card debts. In fact, thanks to Senator Clinton and others, it’s easier for a bank to declare bankruptcy and renegotiate its debts than it is for you. Does it surprise you that four of her top five donors over the last 16 years are Wall Street firms? If so, count yourself among the duped. Are you shocked that among the truly unscrupulous tycoons she has taken cash from is one Donald Trump? The Don, in addition to giving big to her senate campaigns, gave between $100,000 and $250,000 to the Clinton Foundation. Populist babble may burble off Clinton’s lips on the campaign trail, and Democrats may fall for it, but “[d]own on Wall Street they don’t believe it for a minute,” Politico’s William Cohen writes. What’s more, “the big bankers love Clinton, and by and large they badly want her to be president.” (Many are the reports that have said the same.) I don’t know what’s sadder—that Big Money is smarter than the average Dem, or that average Dems will be shocked when she chooses Wall Street over them if she lands in the Oval Office.

She says she’ll protect workers from bad trade deals, then pushes those deals through—and workers over the cliff.

Make no mistake: trade deals like NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership are all about sending American jobs to cheap-labor countries and using the threat of outsourcing to drive down the wages of whatever jobs remain. Trashing environmental regulations is a pleasant effect too. Does anyone remember that as first lady in the 1990s, she backed NAFTA as full-throatedly as her husband did? Or that as senator she went to India and defended outsourcing, saying, “[W]e are not in favor of putting up fences”? On the 2008 campaign trail, however, she claimed to have seen the light: NAFTA, she said, was a mistake, and she just hated seeing telemarketing jobs sent to places like India. But when the campaign was safely behind her, Secretary of State Clinton had another Damascene conversion and threw her weight behind the devastating Trans-Pacific Partnership no fewer than 45 times. But the woman’s capacity for flipping is outdone only by her capacity for flopping. Back on the campaign trail last year, she said she was now reserving judgment on the TPP. In the end, she mustered all of her courage and declared she was against the deal—after it had passed. The balls on that woman. Could we have expected anything different from an eminence who served six years on the board of Wal-Mart and remained silent as that anti-worker colossus waged a virulent campaign against unions?

Clinton likes to cut the figure of a restrained diplomat, but she was and remains a trigger-happy hawk.

Now and then she makes a strong show of advocating diplomacy over belligerence, as when she recently blasted the GOP for looking at Cuba through an “outdated Cold War lens” and pursuing a policy of force-first rather than diplomacy-first: “We cannot afford to let out-of-touch, out-of-date partisan ideas and candidates rip away all the progress we’ve made. We can’t go back to cowboy diplomacy and reckless warmongering.” But cowboy diplomacy and reckless war-mongering have been the hallmarks of her work in affairs foreign. Not only did she vote for the Iraq War, but years after it was plain to everyone that the war was a disaster—and a disaster sold to the American people with a knot of lies—she still defended her vote. Not until 2014, as she prepared to face a Democratic electorate thoroughly disgusted with the war did she do the Clinton pirouette and lament her vote as a mistake. She has uttered no laments for her warmongering while secretary of state. Among the highlights: successfully pushing Obama to wage war in Libya in 2011 (which turned out just ducky, provided you like a power vacuum and the anarchy of hundreds of armed militias fighting for supremacy), successfully pushing him to escalate the war in Afghanistan in 2009 and slow the drawdown in 2010 (fabulous results, those), and pushing but, alas, failing to get him to wage war in Syria in 2012 (and what could have gone wrong with invading a Middle Eastern country to overthrow its tyrant du jour)? Her résumé was well summed by right-wing blowhard “Morning Joe” Scarborough: “Hillary is the neocon’s neocon. It’s going to be fascinating—if she decides to run and she gets the nomination—that she will be more of a sabre-rattler and more of a neocon that the Republican nominee. . . . There’s hardly been a military engagement that Hillary hasn’t been for in the past 20 years.”

She loves to declare that global warming is a fact, that Republicans are nuts for denying it, and that it must be addressed—but at best she has twiddled and diddled while the earth burns and at worst has lit a fistful of matches under the global fire.

Clinton has recently and prominently displayed her climate change bona fides by declaring that global warming has contributed to the Syrian refugee crisis and that Obama is right to curb power plant emissions. Nice words indeed. But as senator she voted in favor of such lovelies as offshore oil drilling, and as secretary of state she led an effort to open up other countries to fracking (she held up the U.S. fracking industry as a model) and supported the calamitous Keystone XL pipeline. But once more, back on the campaign trail, she went mum about the pipeline. “You won’t get me to talk about Keystone,” she said last year, counting on the dupes not to think too hard, “because I have steadily made clear that I’m not going to express an opinion.” Only after it became plain that not only did Democrats overwhelmingly oppose Keystone but the pipeline was going down to defeat anyway did she claim she opposed it. Her record on climate change is so piss-poor that she touts as her biggest climate accomplishment her supervision of the U.S. negotiations at the 2009 Copenhagen climate talks—one of the mightiest failures in the history of the climate change fight, largely because she and others U.S. officials deep-sixed the negotiations even before they began. Is it merest coincidence that Clinton has long been in bed with Big Oil? Merest coincidence that, per a Mother Jones report, nearly all—nearly all—of the lobbyists who are bundling campaign cash for her have worked in the fossil fuel industry? Merest coincidence that oil companies like ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips, to say nothing of oil-rich countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, have given tens of millions of dollars to her charitable foundation? Count yourself among the chumps if you’re surprised that her current plan for climate change not only lacks an utterly essential carbon tax but even a specific commitment to cut greenhouse gases. Instead, she wants to give incentives for solar panels and wind turbines. Perhaps she’ll strew some daisies while she’s at it. “Just plain silly” was the nicest thing that noted climate scientist James Hansen could find to say about it, presumably because “just plain shit” wasn’t fit for genteel print.

She has long argued that everyone should have access to healthcare, and for nearly as long she has worked against it.

Give a devil her due: She supported Obamacare, which is more than you can say for most other Republicans. But for two decades she has consistently argued against the only system that would provide universal health care—a single-payer system—notwithstanding that a single-payer Medicare-for-all program is supported by 81 percent of Democrats and 58 percent of all Americans. In the past, she has deflected calls for single payer by trafficking in extremely modest reforms; her current campaign proposal is more of the same. Her incrementalism has allowed voters to think she really wanted universal health care, but, gosh, the political situation just wouldn’t allow it now. (Incremental Obama agreed, even though he had the votes to pass it or at least make a good run at it.) But last week Clinton revealed her true colors (blood red) when her campaign ripped into Bernie Sanders and his Medicare-for-all plan with a mixture of ferocity and outright lies that would do a Republican proud. The motivation for her attacks? Tanking poll numbers in Iowa and New Hampshire. One suspects the $1 million she has taken from Big Pharma and $2.7 million from insurance companies probably weren’t bad incentives either. Would it stupefy you to learn that she often leads all-comers, even Republican comers, in taking bag money from healthcare profiteers?

I could go on. She vaguely suggests our civil liberties may have been somewhat intruded upon, but neglects to say she voted to eviscerate them with the USA Patriot Act in 2001 and its reauthorization in 2006; she also says the leaks of the heroic whistleblower Edward Snowden were “outrageous” and an aid to terrorists. She says the harsh prison sentences that she and her pot-smoking husband pushed for petty drug-deals and the like were misguided, but she opposes the legalization of pot and ardently backs the death penalty. She trumpets her support for diversity and human rights, but she opposed gay marriage until it was a liability not to (until 2013, to be precise). She says all working Americans should earn a decent living, but as recently as last year she said that raising the minimum wage to a living wage would be inappropriate, and she flatly refused to say what she thought our pathetic $7.25 minimum should be raised to. Only after Sanders’s call for a $15 minimum had gained irresistible momentum did she reluctantly support a $12 wage.

Put simply, on issue after issue Hillary Clinton is a Republican in all but name. How does this consummate Northern Strategist keep getting away with it? The same way the Southern Strategists do. On a few of vital issues, she votes with the Democratic base, sometimes even sincerely, just as an evangelical Southern Strategist may sincerely vote against The Gay Agenda. She backs abortion, she supports Obamacare, she has been good on gun control.

Are these scraps enough to divert voters this time around—enough, that is, to distract them from the real-deal populist Bernie Sanders, a man who for many a year has called for breaking up the big banks, killing anti-labor trade deals, pulling back from eternal war, taxing carbon into the ground, giving everyone health care, legalizing pot, ending the death penalty, stopping unchecked spying on Americans, and much more to warm the chambers of the progressive heart? Every day it seems less and less likely that Clinton’s scraps will suffice. Even general-election voters are swinging Sanders’s way, as polls now show that Sanders, if the general election were held today, would fare better in head-to-head matches against Republicans than Clinton would. I don’t know which prospect is more appealing: that Sanders could write Republicrat Hillary Clinton’s political obituary or that he could write the Northern Strategy’s. In a sense the difference between the Clinton and Sanders campaigns is simply this: she’s betting liberals are too dumb to see her for what she is; he’s betting they’re smart enough to see him for what he is. It’s anyone’s guess which is so.

Steve Hendricks is the author, most recently, of  A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial. His website is SteveHendricks.org.