But Is Hillary Ready for Us?

[KoKo]

But Is Hillary Ready for Us?
William Greider-- March 10, 2015

The not-yet candidate herself spoke to their concerns indirectly when she recently addressed the Silicon Valley Conference for Women. Clinton sketched out progressive goals for family-centered labor-market reforms. They were like love bombs for bleeding-heart liberals.

-----------------snip----------

The Clinton machine’s real target audience, I suspect, are the media pundits and political reporters who will cover the next campaign and inevitably shrink the terms of debate by reducing the substance to a handful of insipid, shorthand clichés. The expressions of what Hillary (maybe) thinks and says as a candidate are meant to assure big media that she truly is a progressive candidate and willing to get beyond the status quo.

This pre-conditioning strategy might very well succeed, at least with the press if not with voters. The makeover has already begun in the establishment press. An op-ed columnist at The New York Times extolled the Larry Summers conversion to liberal economics as significant news headlined “Establishment Populism Rising.” If Clinton is repackaged as a pragmatic “populist,” then the press can cast Elizabeth Warren (not to mention Bernie Sanders and others) as a reckless bomb-thrower. Adjectives like “angry” and “strident” are already being attached to her name.

But these are not normal times. The preliminary skirmishes are more meaningful this time because they reflect the profound crisis of identity that burdens the Democratic Party. What does the party really believe? Whose interests will the nominee truly fight for? Democrats lost their old soul long ago, as critics like myself repeatedly charged. The 2016 election could become the decisive moment that either transforms the party with an aggressively liberal economic agenda or clings to the past and the “corporate-friendly” straddle devised a generation ago by Bill Clinton’s New Democrats.

Trouble is, the New Dems are now the Old Guard. Their center-right program—financial deregulation and “free market” globalization—has not only run out of gas but is rightly blamed for laying the groundwork for financial catastrophe. Yet the New Dem wing still holds the high ground, with big money and loyal supporters as well as Clinton clones populating the key governing positions. The labor-liberal insurgency has a weak bench because for a generation its promising young people were excluded from governing ranks—systematically screened out by both Clinton and Obama administrations—if they showed telltale signs of leaning leftward or embracing non-conformist ideas that resonate with the party’s New Deal values.

By contrast, Republican regimes since Ronald Reagan have always made a point of appointing thousands of young right-wingers to second-level government posts as the training ground for long-term governance. Dems still invoke sentimental rhetoric from the New Deal era, but the practical reality is that the party’s economic policy makers went to school on Wall Street, either before or after their public service (sometimes both).

The gut question is: Can we believe the warm and fuzzy reassurances from the Clinton camp? In politics, after all, it is possible for leopards to change their spots into stripes, and they are often congratulated when they do. On the other hand, it is also true some leopards will change back again after they win the election. I suspect we voters will be arguing this question of credibility right up to the 2016 election.

I am impressed that some well-informed and much-admired economists on the left, like Larry Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute and Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, are congratulating Larry Summers for changing his views. I hope they are right. So why am I not convinced?

Reading the CAP report on “inclusive prosperity,” I began to realize I had heard many of these new ideas long before. Then it hit me. Bill Clinton ran for president on some of the very same stuff back in 1992. His campaign theme in that election year was “Putting People First.” He spelled out his program in great detail, and it helped elect him, though he got less than a majority vote.

Clinton explained he would devote major federal spending to rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure and broadening social guarantees. He promised to protect working people and organized labor who correctly saw their jobs and wages threatened by the new trade agreement called NAFTA. He would go after big-business subsidies and scandalous tax loopholes. Attacking the bloated compensation for corporate executives was the core example of what Clinton intended. What’s not to like?

Within the first months, President Clinton reversed course or abandoned the meat of his promises. He passed NAFTA with Republican votes over labor’s opposition and cut a deal with Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan to let the Fed command a slow-growth economy.

Virtually all of the points made in the Summers report of 2015 could have been made twenty or twenty-five years ago when Bill Clinton was president. In fact, many of them were. Summers is careful to avoid the past, much less even hint at previous views that are now seen as blatantly wrong.

Much More and a Good Read....continued at:

http://www.thenation.com/blog/200897/hillary-ready-us