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alp227

(31,960 posts)
Wed Jun 11, 2014, 01:45 AM Jun 2014

Hillary the Progessive? How she plans to run to Obama's left on the economy.

By MICHAEL HIRSH

June 10, 2014

Bet on it: She won’t be trying the Cinderella Woman thing again. It’s fair to say that no talking point in Hillary Clinton’s hyper-organized book rollout this week fell quite as flat as her rags-to-riches tale of starting out on the wrong side of the tracks … at the White House. How she and poor Bill, “dead broke,” had to labor for days (or was it hours?) at a meager $200,000 a speech before they could afford those multi-million-dollar homes.

It was a very bad start to a critical piece of Clinton profile-building for 2016—and does anyone doubt any longer that’s what she’s up to?—because nowhere is Hillary less defined as a candidate than on economic policy. There is good cause for that lacuna: Upon being named President Obama’s secretary of state in late 2008, Clinton quite properly kept herself out of domestic-policy issues. She had a free pass from the biggest economic debates of the era, whether on the bank bailouts, the president’s nearly $800 billion stimulus package, the Dodd-Frank financial regulation law, Obamacare or the sluggish housing recovery. And yet it is on economic policy—not on foreign policy, on Benghazi, her broader record as secretary of state or even her now-ancient votes as the senator from New York—that she is most likely to build her case for the Oval Office in an era of a chronically wayward recovery and runaway inequality.

To make that case, according to some people familiar with Clinton’s thinking, she is likely to argue that she was often well ahead on those issues the last time she ran for president in 2007—that in fact she was often to the left of the more centrist Obama, who as president has regularly upset his own liberal base for what is perceived as a moderate, Wall Street-friendly response to the financial crisis. “She was talking about inequality before inequality was in vogue,” says Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress and a longtime close aide and adviser to Clinton.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/hillary-clinton-progessive-107686.html

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JDPriestly

(57,936 posts)
1. But will she fight for and sign a Glass-Steagall bill for the 21st century?
Wed Jun 11, 2014, 03:56 AM
Jun 2014

Elizabeth Warren will.

That issue is where Hillary's plan to deceive the electorate will fail.

liberal_at_heart

(12,081 posts)
4. It's not that hard to deceive the electorate. All she has to do is promise to do it and some will
Wed Jun 11, 2014, 03:25 PM
Jun 2014

believe her. She will do what all politicians do. Make promises during the campaign and then break that promise after being elected.

JDPriestly

(57,936 posts)
5. Right, whereas if we elect Elizabeth Warren, she will fight for the middle class in many ways
Wed Jun 11, 2014, 03:52 PM
Jun 2014

because that is really what is in her heart and what she knows a lot about and what she has devoted her life to.

karynnj

(59,474 posts)
6. Obama never voted for any version of the dreadful bankruptcy bill - Hillary did
Wed Jun 11, 2014, 03:59 PM
Jun 2014

(Though she did vote no on closure for the one that did pass in 2006.)

The collapse of the economy was not an issue in the primary because, although the recession had started the crash happened in September. Therefore most of those issues were not issues yet - especially the Dodd/Frank legislation that was in response to it.

BOTH Obama and Hillary Clinton ran as progressives in the primary on many issues - including health care. NO ONE could win running elsewise in a Democratic primary that year. (Hillary was always seen as to the left of Bill Clinton, but he was seen as a proudly conservative Democrat.)

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