Jefferson, Jackson and Robert Rubin's Hamilton Project by Kevin Phillips

Jefferson, Jackson and Robert Rubin’s Hamilton Project
By Kevin Phillips

As progressive Democrats from California to New Hampshire hold their traditional Jefferson-Jackson Day dinners, they must pause for a groan at ex-Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin’s April ploy for re-lionizing himself as the party’s top economic thinker. It’s a Washington-based bit of pretentiousness called – of all things – the Hamilton Project.

Rubin, now Chairman of the Executive Committee of Citigroup, the world’s biggest bank, co-chairs the HP with fellow Wall Streeter Roger Altman, in thinly disguised pursuit of moving party policymaking from the grassroots of voter primaries and caucuses to the golden financial roots of Manhattan. Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, who loathed Federalist Alexander Hamilton and what he stood for – using government to support the monied classes – must be rolling over in their graves.

Not that this is the first time. Back in the late 19th Century Gilded Age, President Grover Cleveland, a conservative Democrat from New York, fatally divided the national party with his loyalty to Eastern finance. During the 1920s, the Democrats did much the same thing by nominating Wall Street lawyer John W. Davis for president in 1924, sending progressive and labor voting flocking to third-party candidate Robert LaFollette. The Clinton administration, tutored by Rubin, moved in some similar directions. But no one ever dared a Hamilton Project.

My interest was piqued some weeks ago by a blistering attack on me and my new book American Theocracy: The Perils and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money by Jacob Weisberg, the editor of Slate. Not knowing Weisberg – indeed, barely knowing who he is – his venom was a surprise, and likewise his odd pre-occupation: that I have tried to mislead Democratic economic policymakers who should ignore me. The name Robert Rubin appeared nowhere in this screed.

more at.....

http://www.tpmcafe.com/node/29930

...an Aaron Burr project?

Kudos to you.

Nice to see him slice and dice Rubin and his mouthpiece.