Let's Talk About Hillary

There will be other links of course but I'm mostly going to write about Hillary.

The Arrow Points to the Right for a Reason.

Hillary puts me in a tough position. I feel like the push to be seen as a progressive is more or less fake. She represents a right leaning side of the democratic party that emerged after the Reagan-era thumping the old left took. It is precisely those policies that led to the rise in income inequality and the great recession. I'm talking about repealing Glass-Stegall, cutting capital gains taxes, and encouraging "neo-liberal" trade which offshored much of our manufacturing. Oh, and a total hard-on for war.

Of course, that's how politics works. You tell one story to the funding apparatus of billionaires and corporations and another story to the voters. I linked this piece yesterday but it bears repeating: Both parties want more low pay work for poor Americans. That's the rub, look at any other issue and the story is the same. Hillary can stump about, say, more childcare at the workplace and easier leave policies. Those make her progressive and a champion for women. I agree with those policies, but let's not pretend that getting people to work more at bad jobs is a permanent or fully desirable solution. There needs to be a case made for upward mobility and I don't see that.

Indeed, when I look at Hillary's economic policies, I see more of the same. Wall St. loves Hillary because she's genuinely one of them. Her daughter married a hedge fund bro. The Clinton Global Initiative is essentially a private equity firm with politics as its purpose. Indeed, they see exactly what I see when I look at Hillary: someone who will say what's necessary to get elected and then make policy in exactly the way they want.

Down on Wall Street they don’t believe it for a minute. While the finance industry does genuinely hate Warren, the big bankers love Clinton, and by and large they badly want her to be president. Many of the rich and powerful in the financial industry—among them, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman, Tom Nides, a powerful vice chairman at Morgan Stanley, and the heads of JPMorganChase and Bank of America—consider Clinton a pragmatic problem-solver not prone to populist rhetoric. To them, she’s someone who gets the idea that we all benefit if Wall Street and American business thrive. What about her forays into fiery rhetoric? They dismiss it quickly as political maneuvers. None of them think she really means her populism.

It's not just policy toward the big banks, it's also policy toward the rich in general.  Will Hillary Clinton Follow Democrats on Capital Gains? No:

In a debate in April of that year, Mrs. Clinton said she would not raise the capital gains rate above 20 percent “if I raised it at all.” At the time, the top rate was 15 percent, as a result of the Bush tax cuts. Ms. Clinton’s position was in line with the economic policies of Bill Clinton’s administration, which called for much higher tax rates on wage income than capital income for high earners. In 1997, Mr. Clinton signed a law that cut the top capital gains tax rate from 28 percent to 20; in 1993, he had raised the top tax rate on ordinary income from 31 percent to 39.6 percent, and imposed a Medicare tax on high earners that effectively pushed their top tax rates above 40.

For all of the populism and "middle-class economics" of her campaign, we might just end up with a president that recreates the economic policies of the late 1990s. We live in an era where earned income is not a large part of the wealth and income of the very rich. Of course, that's a feature not a bug. A low capital gains tax and a higher income tax is designed to place the tax burden on the middle class but it is also a way for politicians to claim they're being progressive without actually being progressive. Moreover, the middle class is significantly smaller and significantly poorer than they were in 1997 relative to the growth that was happening in the 90s.

Clinton is also just about as hawkish as I could ever imagine a democrat being. Obviously she was in hot water in 2008 over voting for the Iraq war and it remains to be seen if that's going to come back and haunt her. ISIS pretty much exists because of the wreck we made of Iraq and she's not going to be keen on pointing out her role there. Indeed, her argument is that we should have been more interventionist in the Syrian conflict by arming the moderates from the get-go so they could stop ISIS and fight the regime. She's also open to lengthening our troop commitment in Afghanistan. On the bright side, she is at least in support of the nuclear deal with Iran.

Now, many of these positions were outlined a year or two ago. Hillary has been trying on a lot of hats in the meantime to get a feel for what would be most effective in a campaign. I don't take much comfort in that as it means she obviously pandering to the electorate. She's got a lot of time for outline exact policy proposals which might set my mind at ease a little bit more.I also think Hillary is going to represent me well on social issues: pro-gay marriage, pro-healthcare, pro-gender equity. There's definitely no republican candidate I'd consider voting for and there's not going to be a democratic primary challenger to Hillary. Her populist rhetoric (and it is just rhetoric) further insulates her against challengers from the left side of the party who won't be able to adequately differentiate themselves. I guess that makes her the least bad option available to someone like me. I hate that that's the world we live in but I don't see how anything will change.

So, there's 574 days of campaigning to go. It is going to be ugly and probably one of the most depressing campaigns in recent memory. Given the GOP's behavior under Obama, I'd imagine that obstructionism and personal attacks are going to be the name of the game for a Clinton presidency. Everybody knows that so the positive "I'm gonna change the world" message isn't going to be convincing. Instead, she's going to have to present herself as someone who will defend us against the GOP and forces which want to destroy the middle class. And that's what we're seeing. Hillary is an oligarch in populist's clothing. Her policies are superficially attractive but ultimately benefit her patrons on Wall St. more than the average American. On the foreign policy front, she's an interventionist plain and simple. Maybe not a warmonger like most of the GOP but she'll be putting boots on the ground and jets in the sky far more often than I'd like.

What's a person like me to do?