Plutocrat Or Populist? Actually, Hillary Clinton Is Neither (Joe Conason)

[Dawgs]

http://www.nationalmemo.com/plutocrat-populist-actually-hillary-clinton-neither/

As America’s biggest political target – a status she is likely to enjoy for the foreseeable future – Hillary Rodham Clinton takes incoming fire of every caliber from all directions. One day her words are ripped from context to depict her as a plutocratic elitist; on another day, she is quoted, selectively, to prove that she is a raving populist. And on still another day last week, when she was campaigning in North Carolina for Senator Kay Hagan, a right-wing rag tarred her as a “plutocratic populist.”

“I’m talking about people who get up and go to work every day, [whose paychecks] haven’t been raised since 1997,” she told a conservative farmers’ group in 2007. “And congressional salaries have gone up more than $30,000 at the same time. I don’t think we should have any more congressional pay raises until, number one, the minimum wage is raised, but number two, until average wages start going up, because the last five years Americans have been treading water.”

Clinton is a sharp, tough, determined politician who rose, like her husband, from an ordinary family. She understands the pressures wreaking havoc on the system of rewards and rules that built this country. Neither plutocrat nor populist, she firmly believes a strong middle class is the essence of a democratic society. But amid the ceaseless clamor of right-wing ideology, that may just be radical enough.

--Discuss--

[Thinkingabout]

1. Hillary has long fought for the middle class, she fought hard for civil rights, still fights for

civil rights. She has worked worldwide for women's rights, to curtain violence against women and education for women. She has worked to increase minimum wages and health care. These are issues important to the middle class and Democrats.

[djean111]

2. Puff piece.

She is not the least bit populist. See - H-1b visas, TPP. The TPP is not the work of a Populist.

"Clinton is a sharp, tough, determined politician" - not Populist at all. But evidently her handlers think saying it enough times will make a Warren or Sanders type go away, or be preempted. Deeds not words.

[VanillaRhapsody]

3. oh yes she is...as much as Warren is...

[Dawgs]

4. Your lack of any 'message text' says a lot.

Explaining why she's just as much a populist as Warren would help.

[VanillaRhapsody]

6. http://ontheissues/hillary_clinton htm

Nuff said...

[Dawgs]

11. Exactly. "Nuff said". n/t

[VanillaRhapsody]

13. ooops forgot the.org

Http://ontheissues.org/hillary_clinton.htm

Oh and EW is there to along with many others...

[wyldwolf]

9. The opposite is posted daily here on Hillary

Puff Piece:

Noun
puff piece (plural puff pieces)

A journalistic form of puffery; an article or story of exaggerating praise that often ignores or downplays opposing viewpoints or evidence to the contrary.

As opposed to the Hit Pieces posted daily on DU.

[merrily]

10. Yup. An attempt at one, anyway. Not a very meaningful or convincing attempt, but attempted

puffing it is.

[merrily]

5. This article says a lot of meaningless things. Literally.

"Plutocrat," a word drived from two words meaning power and money. If a former Senator and former first lady of Arkansas and of the United States, whose family is worth well over 100 million dollars is not a US plutocrat, who the hell in the US is?

"Populism" is about ordinary people, esp. as opposed to the so-called "elites."

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/populist

Yet, I don't think this author really meant to convey to us that Hillary is not about representing ordinary people.


This author seems to think that the middle class is something separate from "ordinary people." Yet, while the author, like most politicians, goes on about the middle class, the author never defines it.

As I have posted several times before, this is no accident, IMO. Most people just assume that they are middle class, even if they are near the poverty line or near the top 10%. So, a lot of votes in that group. Hence politicos love to blabber about the middle class without defining it

As for 20th century progressivism, at least half of the people who hear that term will hear something akin to "liberal." But, 19th century progressives were the left wing of the Republican Party. Obama has called himself both a New Democrat and a progressive--and has compared himself to Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican President who later ran on the Progressive ticket. And, the 20th century founder and current head of the Progressive Policy Instititute, Will Marshall, was a DLC founder who signed the 2003 PNAC letter urging Bush to invade Iraq, an invasion Hillary urged her fellow Senators to vote for. So, who the hell knows what this author means by "20th century progressivism?"

Some DUers think I make too much of formal definitions of words. And even get angry about it, for some reason. (Really? I don't write the dictionaries, folks.) "I don't apologize." (Brando, The Godfather.)

There is no communication at all if each of us uses a word to mean whatever each of us kinda sorta thinks/assumes the word means.

Too often, we have only a "truthy" idea of what words important to our lives and families and to our country mean: democracy, plutocracy, middle class, neoliberal, US liberal, etc. We need to look up definitions more. Then, if we want to get creative about a word after that, fine. But, at least start with a dictionary or a wiki or encyclopedia article.

Bottom line: I have no clue what this author is going on about and I have no clue if the author knows, either.

[cali]

7. oh fucking please. Hillary supported out sourcing. She is one of the architects of the

ugly TPP. She's a devout admirer of Kissinger. She's deeply entangled with the banksters. And she is a shitty, shitty campaigner.

what a piece of dogshit from the idiot Conason.

[hifiguy]

8. Bullshit.

She has consistently sided with corporatists and war hawks for a long while now.

[AtomicKitten]

12. Pfft.

[Algernon Moncrieff]

14. K & R

During her Senate career and then as a Democratic presidential candidate, Clinton told everyone who would listen what she thought about questions of fairness, inequality and growth that remain central today. She dismissed the idea that higher minimum wages damage growth and employment; she demanded restoration of the traditional balance between government and markets, which had tipped too much toward corporate power; she blasted the Bush administration's cuts in assistance to the poor and unemployed; and she urged, above all, that the forces destroying the middle class must be restrained and ultimately reversed.

Whatever her connections with the wealthy and well-connected, Clinton doesn't seem terribly impressed. "With all due respect, rich people did not make America great," she said in 2006. "Every society throughout history has had the rich and the poor. It was America's destiny to create something new, a middle class that provided upward mobility for the poor and opportunity for the many. Our strength, our economy, our values derive from the promise of America, the promise of lifting yourself up through hard work in a society that rewards results." In her presidential campaign, she called for a "21st-century progressivism" in the trust-busting, labor-friendly style of Theodore Roosevelt.

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/actually-hillary-clinton-neither-plutocrat-nor-populist