Post by jeffolie on Dec 18, 2013 11:47:12 GMT -6
Dec. 18, 2013
Wooing Wall Street, Hillary dares Warren to run in ‘16
Commentary: Democrats captive to false narrative about Clinton years
(MarketWatch) — Sometimes it seems like Hillary Clinton is daring Elizabeth Warren to challenge her for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016.
The former first lady, senator and secretary of state is making a point of wooing Wall Street donors and telling them how much she loves them, implicitly dissing the senator from Massachusetts, who has based her political career on a crusade against banks’ greed and misbehavior.
At least that’s the impression you get from a Politico report about Clinton’s love fest with titans of finance at a recent Goldman Sachs event, where she told them Wall Street-bashing is foolish.
“Striking a soothing note on the global financial crisis,” reporters Ben White and Maggie Haberman wrote after speaking to several attendees, “she told the audience, in effect: We all got into this mess together, and we’re all going to have to work together to get out of it.”
The reporters continued: “What the bankers heard her to say was just what they would hope for from a prospective presidential candidate: Beating up the finance industry isn’t going to improve the economy — it needs to stop.”
The report makes it clear that Clinton’s remarks were seen as a “repudiation” of “angry anti-Wall Street rhetoric” from supporters of Warren and Ohio Democrat Sen. Sherrod Brown.
Clinton is portrayed as throwing a lifeline to these beaten-up Wall Street denizens, offering “a glimpse to a future in which Wall Street might repair its frayed political relationships.”
Clinton, it seems, is willing to duke it out with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to see who can be Wall Street’s favorite candidate, if Christie, as widely expected, tosses his hat in the ring for the Republican nomination in 2016.
Hillary Clinton is following in the footsteps of her husband, former President Bill Clinton, whose Wall Street-friendly administration championed financial deregulation and installed a former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs, Robert Rubin, as Treasury secretary. (Since leaving the White House, the former president has reaped a fortune speaking at gigs like the Goldman Sachs event headlined by Hillary.)
Hillary Clinton evidently feels that much of the public anger against banks will have dissipated by 2016, when the economy will presumably be sunnier. In any case, putting her markers in now with Wall Street can immunize her if liberal Democrats force her to tack to the left once campaigning begins in earnest.
Politico even quotes “a well-place Democrat” as saying, “Wall Street folks are so happy about [having Clinton run] that they won’t care what she says.”
So the gauntlet has been thrown down, and the only real question is why Warren, who insists she won’t run for president, would fail to pick it up and rise to the challenge.
Because she’s afraid of losing? Because she’s tired of snarky remarks about her undocumented American Indian heritage? Because she’s too much like Barack Obama as a first-term senator with little political or administrative experience? Because Clinton would beat her at the funding game?
As another potential candidate for the Democratic nomination, Vice President Joe Biden, might say, that’s a “bunch of stuff.”
Someone has got to free the Democratic Party from the albatross of Clintonite centrism, and it’s not likely to be Hillary Clinton.
Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, argued in his typically lucid fashion in a recent blog post that having so many top figures in the party who earned their chops in the Clinton administration perpetuates a radical misreading of the economic boom in that era.
“They want to preserve the fiction that the prosperity of the late 1990s was due to deficit reduction rather than an unsustainable stock bubble,” Baker writes.
That stock bubble, which inflated consumption and created a federal budget surplus, burst and saddled the Bush administration with a recession that only deficit spending could remedy (though Baker specifies that waging war is not the ideal way to stimulate the economy).
This misreading of the Clinton legacy is why, Baker concludes, so many Democrats join Republicans in harping about the deficit as a problem, when in fact the biggest challenge facing this country is unemployment.
“Politicians love to repeat the canard that families have to eventually balance their budgets, therefore governments must also,” Baker writes. “This assertion makes about as much sense as claiming that the earth is flat because we can see the ground in front of us is level.”
Warren, whose progressive politics go well beyond bank-bashing, could be the one to free Democrats from what Baker calls this “flat-earth economics.”
She has demonstrated she can raise funds without relying on Wall Street, she showed her ability to rally labor at the AFL-CIO national convention in September, and she says she is committed to reducing inequality and restoring middle-class prosperity.
So why on earth wouldn’t Warren take up Clinton’s dare and run against Wall Street’s candidate of choice?
www.marketwatch.com/story/wooing-wall-street-hillary-dares-warren-to-run-in-16-2013-12-18?link=mw_home_kiosk
Wooing Wall Street, Hillary dares Warren to run in ‘16
Commentary: Democrats captive to false narrative about Clinton years
(MarketWatch) — Sometimes it seems like Hillary Clinton is daring Elizabeth Warren to challenge her for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016.
The former first lady, senator and secretary of state is making a point of wooing Wall Street donors and telling them how much she loves them, implicitly dissing the senator from Massachusetts, who has based her political career on a crusade against banks’ greed and misbehavior.
At least that’s the impression you get from a Politico report about Clinton’s love fest with titans of finance at a recent Goldman Sachs event, where she told them Wall Street-bashing is foolish.
“Striking a soothing note on the global financial crisis,” reporters Ben White and Maggie Haberman wrote after speaking to several attendees, “she told the audience, in effect: We all got into this mess together, and we’re all going to have to work together to get out of it.”
The reporters continued: “What the bankers heard her to say was just what they would hope for from a prospective presidential candidate: Beating up the finance industry isn’t going to improve the economy — it needs to stop.”
The report makes it clear that Clinton’s remarks were seen as a “repudiation” of “angry anti-Wall Street rhetoric” from supporters of Warren and Ohio Democrat Sen. Sherrod Brown.
Clinton is portrayed as throwing a lifeline to these beaten-up Wall Street denizens, offering “a glimpse to a future in which Wall Street might repair its frayed political relationships.”
Clinton, it seems, is willing to duke it out with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to see who can be Wall Street’s favorite candidate, if Christie, as widely expected, tosses his hat in the ring for the Republican nomination in 2016.
Hillary Clinton is following in the footsteps of her husband, former President Bill Clinton, whose Wall Street-friendly administration championed financial deregulation and installed a former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs, Robert Rubin, as Treasury secretary. (Since leaving the White House, the former president has reaped a fortune speaking at gigs like the Goldman Sachs event headlined by Hillary.)
Hillary Clinton evidently feels that much of the public anger against banks will have dissipated by 2016, when the economy will presumably be sunnier. In any case, putting her markers in now with Wall Street can immunize her if liberal Democrats force her to tack to the left once campaigning begins in earnest.
Politico even quotes “a well-place Democrat” as saying, “Wall Street folks are so happy about [having Clinton run] that they won’t care what she says.”
So the gauntlet has been thrown down, and the only real question is why Warren, who insists she won’t run for president, would fail to pick it up and rise to the challenge.
Because she’s afraid of losing? Because she’s tired of snarky remarks about her undocumented American Indian heritage? Because she’s too much like Barack Obama as a first-term senator with little political or administrative experience? Because Clinton would beat her at the funding game?
As another potential candidate for the Democratic nomination, Vice President Joe Biden, might say, that’s a “bunch of stuff.”
Someone has got to free the Democratic Party from the albatross of Clintonite centrism, and it’s not likely to be Hillary Clinton.
Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, argued in his typically lucid fashion in a recent blog post that having so many top figures in the party who earned their chops in the Clinton administration perpetuates a radical misreading of the economic boom in that era.
“They want to preserve the fiction that the prosperity of the late 1990s was due to deficit reduction rather than an unsustainable stock bubble,” Baker writes.
That stock bubble, which inflated consumption and created a federal budget surplus, burst and saddled the Bush administration with a recession that only deficit spending could remedy (though Baker specifies that waging war is not the ideal way to stimulate the economy).
This misreading of the Clinton legacy is why, Baker concludes, so many Democrats join Republicans in harping about the deficit as a problem, when in fact the biggest challenge facing this country is unemployment.
“Politicians love to repeat the canard that families have to eventually balance their budgets, therefore governments must also,” Baker writes. “This assertion makes about as much sense as claiming that the earth is flat because we can see the ground in front of us is level.”
Warren, whose progressive politics go well beyond bank-bashing, could be the one to free Democrats from what Baker calls this “flat-earth economics.”
She has demonstrated she can raise funds without relying on Wall Street, she showed her ability to rally labor at the AFL-CIO national convention in September, and she says she is committed to reducing inequality and restoring middle-class prosperity.
So why on earth wouldn’t Warren take up Clinton’s dare and run against Wall Street’s candidate of choice?
www.marketwatch.com/story/wooing-wall-street-hillary-dares-warren-to-run-in-16-2013-12-18?link=mw_home_kiosk