Archive for the ‘Wall Street’ Tag
It isn’t a case of the Democrats now going off soul searching, it case of total revamp from top to bottom after Trump’s win last Tuesday. The Amazing Democrats’ advice very early on to the Clinton Campaign (and some of those comments were posted on our social media platforms as far back as the late summer of 2015) went unheard unlike when we worked for the Obama/Biden campaign in 2012. It is time DNC to fire all your overpaid pollsters (who got it so wrong), consultants and the like. The DNC should of known in their hearts of hearts that after Bernie Sanders won twenty-two states with so little money against Hillary Clinton, their candidate of choice would be in serious trouble if the Republicans got a candidate who could storm the mainstream and social media which Trump did and of course got a bit of luck along the way with that first letter released by the FBI Director that certainly damaged Hillary in early voting and gave a huge boast for Trump with his base. Yes, a lot of questions will be asked as to how the FBI were allowed to influence an election so openly. But this was far from the only reason Hillary lost even if the DNC die hards believe it to be so. The DNC and Democrats have lost their way and have been now for a long time. Their obsession only seems to be with fundraising not the core principles of what the party was founded on, Trump was able to tap into that huge hole in the DNC. It was a party that once cared for the low income, the homeless, our veterans, the poor people of America and not the massive billions of dollars in fundraising which was totally wasted trying to take Trump down. Just think today how many homeless people that billion of dollars plus would do to help house the homeless crisis in our major cities which should have been a top issue for Hillary.
Hillary campaign interviewed myself and members of The Amazing Democrats, for the record we call ourselves The Amazing Democrats as we not die hard Democrats, we wouldn’t have followed Hillary in to the fires of hell if she was wrong and we wouldn’t be silent either even if it meant we were fired from the campaign, that’s the way worked in the Obama/Biden 2012 reelection campaign and we were amazed how we survived not to be fired (nearly maybe once or twice when we really overstepped our mark and criticized some of the President’s polices publicly). The interviewing process went back as far as January 2016 to join her campaign. We were subjected to rounds and rounds of interviews, back ground checks, etc. Months would go by and we heard nothing and then it would start all over again. It was by late August this Editor got interviewed for the sixth time, more back ground checks and then was offered four important positions in four different swing states and one of this offers came directly from the DNC. All this was paid employment and not volunteer work. That last weekend in August for me was were I suffered so much turmoil as I had to give them a decision by the following Monday. It meant dropping everything in my life and getting on a plane to Pennsylvania. What was most troubling in my mind was I could sense there was panic setting in for the Democrats and Hillary’s campaign. I didn’t sleep that weekend. I went back to the old formula that the Obama campaign thought me and even though I didn’t have access to data like we did when worked for Obama, never the less, I ran the data all weekend long. It is a long and laborious process that you can see today that both the pollsters and media don’t do, why? Maybe they just are too lazy to do it, who knows? You have to run every state’s county’s data county by county, you have then figure in the data available from both the candidates’ primary wins or loses, a lot of mathematics but in the end you get a somewhat overview, be it very rough. Also you have to take into account that I had been tracking the swing states every week since both primaries ended last year. Not good for Hillary and her team I could see, in fact the Wednesday before the election I was gloomy, I could predict Trump was going to win Ohio by three percent (he won by five percent so I was only out by two percent) and as you know, no Presidential candidate can take their place in The White House if they don’t win Ohio. With all this, it was the hardiest email I ever sent, declining the positions to work on the Hillary Clinton campaign.
As we move into the Trump Presidency, it’s going to be a very dark lonely path for the Democrats. Yes, there is the mid-terms in 2018, but if the DNC works as it has for the last twenty years, they are a very slow climb back up on Capitol Hill as remember this Presidential election in 2016 had the lowest turn out of voters in years, which helped Trump but destroyed Hillary’s chances of winning, nearly 50% of the electorate didn’t bother to vote and historically mid-term voting has a very low voter turn-out. Also if Trump makes any small success of his first term and as everything Trump touches turns to gold, whether you like his manner and process or not and as it very hard to unseat a sitting President, as we all know, Trump going for a second term, then the DNC and Democrats could be looking at the wildness for next eight years at least, that’s 2024, a very depressing thought I know, but maybe a fact unless the DNC make radically chances and that starts today, not six months before the 2018 mid-terms.
In the 2006 mid-terms under George W. Bush, the Republicans got wiped out in the House and the Senate. All the media said at that time that Republican Party need to reinvent itself and stop been the “party of no”. Did they? Of course not, in fact under Obama as President and because of their hatred of him, they became the “party of no, no, no” on every bill he sent to the House and Senate. Now look where they are ten years later. The power of Washington again with the Democrats hanging onto their coattails and the sad thing is, Trump gets to pick the next Supreme Court justice. If he gets two terms, who knows, with three more justices ready for retirement in the next few years, he might even hit the golden jackpot of nominating four Supreme Court justices, a very scary thought. The Democrats however can’t do as the Republicans did in 2006, which was nothing to change their image and beliefs but the Democrats aren’t so lucky. If the DNC go back to business as usual, it will be a very dark long road for the Democrats back to the shining lights of The White House. It is simply the base. The Republican base and the Democrat base is so so much different and as Trump said decades ago when he was a registered Democrat, pro-choice and donated a lot of money to Bill Clinton’s Presidential campaigns: “If I was to run as President, I would run as a Republican as their voters as so dumb and easy to fool, I would lie and lie to them until I got numbers”. That’s all he had to do for this Presidential campaign and he is the winner today not Hillary Clinton.
Which brings what fundamentally went south very early on in the Hillary Clinton campaign:
1. NEVER EVER underestimate your opponent.
2. If he/she gets down in the dirt, you go down there with them. Hillary taking the high road was her downfall as political correctness (PC) means nothing anymore in the world of social media as we saw with Trump, the King of Twitter and Obama/Biden in 2008 as the King of Facebook. PC has gone way too far in the US and the rest of the world and Trump, no matter what you think, turned PC on it’s head in this presidential election and as he said on 60 Minutes last night, “it was nasty, very nasty but I am the one sitting here today talking to you and not them”. In fact 2020 and 2024 will be so so much nastier. Rumors were that Trump using his own money, paid pockets of supporters all over America to flood the internet with lies about Hillary and Bill Clinton and the secret? They could never be traced back to him or his campaign. Why didn’t the Hillary Clinton campaign do the same with the rumors about Trump’s ties to the Mafia? Why was this never floated all over the internet? PC I guess but he won and Clinton lost. The new trend now with Presidential campaigns as Trump has lowered the bar, is to win 2020 or 2024 the candidates from both parties to win, will have to get down in the mud and get dirty. Sad? Of course but no cares about the loser, they only care about the winner.
3. Dump the negative ads. One billion dollars was such a waste of money by the Clinton campaign and Trump barely spent a faction of that. We kept telling the Obama/Biden campaign and the DNC in 2012, negative ads don’t work anymore and only turn all the voters off. Pity they didn’t listen.
The Amazing Democrats are not all about criticizing without offering the DNC suggestions for the road forward:
1. Fire all your overpaid pollsters, consultants, lobbyists, etc..
2. Allow the progressive members of the party to take over. (I do not mean the loony left), members who understand the issues of the day to day worries of the lower income Americans (who sadly are too many), the homeless crisis in our cities all over America, our veterans living on our streets.
3. Get back to what a community organizer really is. I used get so annoy with new volunteers who joined our team who tried to tell the person forcefully on the other side of the phone why they should vote for Obama or donate to Obama’s campaign and the DNC. A community organizer’s job is to listen and listen well and then send what they hear up the line and hope they are listening otherwise you get a result like Tuesday’s Presidential elections.
4. As the advice to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, get off the negative ads obsession (turns all voters off).
5. And please with every email you sent, stop looking for donations all the time. It makes us feel you don’t care about anything but money and donations which we know to be true.
6. Find the soul of the Democrat Party again of FDR and John F. Kennedy.
7. And finally, listen. Never stop listening to those on the ground as we are the ones who can make the difference from the Democrats winning or losing an election.
Here is to the 2018 mid-terms, see you then and to 2020 Presidential election. Keep the faith and a sense of humor as The Amazing Democrats do and God Bless America,
Editor, The Amazing Democrats.
Follow us on twitter: @DemocratAmazing
“No matter what side you’re on or not on, your opinion and vote does really matter”. – Be involved and be heard.
Even seven years after the financial crisis, Wall Street has lost none of its ability to stir partisan rancor.
The Republican presidential candidates are almost entirely unified behind repealing the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul legislation approved by a Democratic-controlled Congress after the 2008 collapse, which was brought on by reckless mortgage lending. That rollback would undoubtedly allow for more unfettered trading and lending.
Pushing in the opposition direction, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s two challengers for the Democratic nomination have made it a priority to bring back a Depression-era law that would force the biggest banks to break up.
Mrs. Clinton has joined the chorus of Democrats demanding more oversight of Wall Street, recognizing that the issue has become a rallying cry among progressive activists and is bound up in the broader debate on income and wealth inequality.
But Mrs. Clinton, who has won strong financial support from Wall Street in the past, has been piecing together a more unexpected set of policy proposals — including a change in the way capital gains, or profits on investments, are taxed. Her proposals so far strike a more moderate note than those of her fellow Democrats, but they also have a more realistic chance of becoming law if she is elected president.
“The things she is talking about are very different than what the left is talking about,” said Matt McDonald, a partner at Hamilton Place Strategies who has worked on financial issues for the Republican candidates in the last two presidential elections. “The different ways that the candidates are approaching it are very interesting.”
The array of views emerging from the presidential primaries suggests that the financial industry — as well as investors and consumers — could face sharply different futures depending on which party ends up in the White House.
The most sweeping proposals have come from Mrs. Clinton’s two challengers for the Democratic nomination. Former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley kicked off his candidacy in May with a speech that pointed a finger at the “bullies of Wall Street” and followed up with an open letter to the “Wall Street megabanks,” which he labeled “too big to fail, too big to manage, and too big to jail.”
Mr. O’Malley’s primary policy proposal would bring back the Glass-Steagall Act, which was introduced as part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and forced a separation between commercial and Wall Street banks. If that were re-enacted, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Bank of America, among others, would all have to be essentially cleaved in two.
Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont and self-described democratic socialist, has made a similar call for the return of Glass-Steagall in his proposals for changing finance, which is at the top of his campaign’s list of issues.
Mr. Sanders and Mr. O’Malley are taking advantage of the surge in enthusiasm that Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts has captured through her own criticism of the biggest banks, which hold an even larger portion of American assets than they did before the financial crisis.
While this has largely been an issue for the left, the populist appeal of the position across party lines was underscored when Rick Perry, the former governor of Texas, also raised the prospect of separating the banks, along the lines of Glass-Steagall, in a speech he gave in late July as he tried to win more attention for his faltering candidacy.
Last month, at Mrs. Clinton’s first major speech on the economy, a heckler in the audience stood up and demanded to know if she, too, would push for a reimposition of the 1933 law. She did not answer the question at the time, but at a later event she said that the problems in the industry could not be solved by a single solution like a new version of Glass-Steagall.
This is tricky territory for Hillary Clinton. For one thing, Bill Clinton signed off on the 1999 law that essentially did away with Glass-Steagall — a change that some have blamed for encouraging the consolidation of the financial industry and ultimately the government bailouts of 2008.
Mrs. Clinton has acknowledged that the continuing power and influence of the financial industry is a major issue. In her first speech on the economy, she said that “ ‘too big to fail’ is still too big a problem.” But perhaps more significantly, Mrs. Clinton hired, as her campaign treasurer, Gary Gensler, a former Goldman Sachs executive who developed a reputation for cracking down on Wall Street — and allying himself with Ms. Warren — during his time as the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
Last month, Mr. Gensler sent a fund-raising letter to Mrs. Clinton’s supporters emphasizing her drive to “advance Wall Street reform,” and prosecute wrongdoing in the financial industry.
But it is not clear what specific measures she would pursue on that front. While the Obama administration has been light on prosecution for wrongdoing, it has already put in place regulations that have forced banks to cut back their trading activities and holdings of risky assets. Mrs. Clinton’s proposals recognize the change that has already occurred and do not appear to be intended to cause a big shake-up of the industry.
Her most concrete proposal introduced late last month would sharply increase the capital gains tax rate that investors pay on assets held for less than six years. A wealthy speculator who sells a stock after holding it for two years, for instance, would pay a 39.6 percent tax rate on any gains — the same top rate that is taxed on ordinary income. Currently, the top tax rate on capital gains held for more than a year is 20 percent, about half the rate on ordinary income.
Mrs. Clinton, who cultivated close ties with Wall Street when she was a senator from New York, said the policy was part of her broader effort to end the intense focus on short-term profits, which has been pressed on corporate America by big investors. In the same vein, Mrs. Clinton has advocated rules that would encourage companies to share profits with employees as well as investors.
William Gale, the co-director of the Tax Policy Center, said the tax change proposed by Mrs. Clinton would narrow a popular tax break and increase the amount of taxes paid by wealthy Americans. But in itself, the plan would not change much behavior on Wall Street.
Many of the most powerful investors are pensions and endowments that don’t pay capital gains taxes. For those that do pay taxes, Mr. Gale noted, the big and increasingly important private equity funds rarely engage in short-term trading, generally hold their investments for more than five years and would thus be unaffected by the proposed change.
Mrs. Clinton and her Democratic challengers have also argued for policy that would help check extremely short-term investors like high-frequency traders who rely on complex computer programs.
Mrs. Clinton, unlike Mr. Sanders and Mr. O’Malley, has not called for a tiny tax on all financial transactions — a levy commonly used in Europe, including London, that would be likely to limit high-speed trading. But she has left open the door to such a move. In a speech she gave in New York in late July, she said she would be introducing more proposals for “reining in excessive risk on Wall Street.”
Mrs. Clinton’s focus on so-called short-termism is unlikely to alienate most donors from the financial industry. Her policy suggestions pick up on proposals that have recently been made by overhaul-minded executives in the financial industry, including Warren E. Buffett and the chief executive of BlackRock, Laurence D. Fink, who have long bemoaned the fixation on quarterly financial results at the expense of long-term investment and growth.
Even Republican executives on Wall Street suggest that given Mrs. Clinton’s proposals so far, she is unlikely to turn into a foe of the industry. She is also avoiding some of the antagonistic rhetoric — like references to “fat cat bankers” — that won President Obama enemies in the industry.
“There’s an overarching sense among the senior people at the banks that she’s not going to be too harsh about us,” said a politically connected Republican executive at a large financial institution, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of alienating other Republicans.
But industry analysts are alert for any shift in Mrs. Clinton’s tone, particularly given the changing flow of donations from the industry toward Republican candidates over the last six years. So far, Mrs. Clinton has raised slightly less money from the big banks than the Republican Jeb Bush and is more reliant on progressive-minded political action committees.
Mr. Bush, a paid adviser to Lehman Brothers and Barclays immediately before the financial crisis, is now seen as the favorite among Wall Street Republicans.
He has largely avoided talking about the financial industry, though he has criticized the Dodd-Frank law for allowing the largest banks to get even bigger. The Republicans Marco Rubio and Scott Walker have gone even further, calling for a full repeal of Dodd-Frank.
Still, none of the Republican candidates have shown any sign of wanting to ally themselves with Wall Street. Republicans like Mr. Rubio and Mr. Walker have explained their opposition to Dodd-Frank by pointing to the harm they claim it has done to smaller banks. But their position is likely to be popular among big banks as well, who have borne most of the costs of the new law.
While many working-class Republicans share a distrust of Wall Street, Mr. McDonald said that pro-business sentiment among most Republican voters would limit attacks on big banks during the primary. The same won’t be true on the Democratic side, however.
“This is the challenge for Hillary,” Mr. McDonald, the Republican adviser, said. “Her challenge and her limitation is her ability to come across on these issues where people want to hear a certain type of anger.”
by Amy Chozick (New York Times)
In the most comprehensive policy speech of her presidential campaign,Hillary Rodham Clinton on Monday presented her vision of a “growth and fairness economy,” an economic agenda intended to lift middle-class wages, expand social services, and increase taxes on the wealthiest Americans to combat a widening gap between rich and poor.
Mrs. Clinton said “the defining economic challenge of our time” is raising incomes for the vast majority of Americans whose wages have remained virtually stagnant for 15 years as the costs of housing, college, child care and health care have soared.
“We must raise incomes for hard-working Americans so they can afford a middle-class life,” Mrs. Clinton said in a speech at the liberal New School in Greenwich Village in New York. “That will be my mission from the first day I’m president to the last.”
The widespread feeling that the economic recovery has not benefited large parts of the population has helped frame the 2016 presidential race. But devising an agenda that addresses income inequality without vilifying the wealthy has been a central challenge of Mrs. Clinton’s early candidacy, and for weeks she pored over policy briefings and academic papers and fielded advice from 200 policy experts who often offered divergent opinions.
Mrs. Clinton did not sign off on a final version of her speech until just before she took the stage, according to advisers involved in the process who would discuss private conversations only unless they were not named. At the last minute, Mrs. Clinton decided to criticize by name three of her potential Republican rivals, adding Senator Marco Rubio of Florida and Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin to the speech in addition to Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor. And considerable hand-wringing went into deciding how forcefully to speak about criminalizing financial industry executives before an audience made up largely of her Wall Street donors.
In the end, Mrs. Clinton did forcefully denounce fraud and manipulation of currency in the financial sector and said there could be “no justification or tolerance for this kind of criminal behavior,” language that some of her top Wall Street backers had been told of in advance. But Mrs. Clinton also appealed to the private sector and Wall Street to work with the government to help lift middle-class wages through long-term investment in employees rather than focus on quarterly results.
“The truth is, Hillary, and I’ve always said this, she is a bold but practical progressive,” said Neera Tanden, the president of the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, and one of the many advisers who helped Mrs. Clinton write the speech. “I really think that’s the stamp of her vision on this.”
That vision may not appease the restless left of the Democratic Party, and it may not assuage concerns among moderates and independents that Mrs. Clinton is a tax-and-spend liberal. But aides said the speech — even with all of the disparate voices that had weighed in to draft it — presented the clearest encapsulation yet of what Mrs. Clinton’s economic doctrine would look like, and the way in which it would be both similar to and distinct from the policies of her husband, former President Bill Clinton, and President Obama.
“Both of them were coming into recessions; she is walking into stagnation,” said Matt Bennett, a senior vice president at Third Way, a centrist think tank.Mrs. Clinton’s assessment Monday of the country’s economic problems, and the message she will carry throughout the campaign, rested entirely on what economists refer to as “the great wage slowdown,” a problem that has persisted through recent administrations, both Democratic and Republican. It has only worsened as globalization and new technology put added pressures on middle- and low-income earners, and has been exacerbated by the rising costs of housing, education and retirement.
The problem has led to widespread frustration; two-thirds of Americans said they thought the distribution of money and wealth in this country should be more even, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll conducted in late May.
In her speech, Mrs. Clinton blamed Republicans, pointing to Mr. Walker, Mr. Bush and Mr. Rubio, specifically, for “trickle down” policies that “give more wealth to those at the top, by cutting their taxes and letting big corporations write their own rules.”
Republicans lost little time in firing back. “It’s pretty clear: She will have to raise taxes on American families,” Allison Moore, a spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee, said of Mrs. Clinton’s proposals. “There’s no way around it.”
But Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics who has written extensively about inequality and is now an adviser to Mrs. Clinton, said that “the speech showed a clear understanding that our economy is not working for most Americans” and that “we need to fundamentally rewrite the rules.”
To that end, Mrs. Clinton called for closing corporate loopholes, eliminating the “carried interest” loophole that allows some financiers to avoid paying millions in income taxes, and expanding the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill. And while she did not present details of her tax policy, she said she would delve more deeply into policies that would “rein in excessive risks on Wall Street” in the coming weeks.
Still, she did not embrace the fiery populism of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, one of her Democratic opponents, whose message has helped him draw big crowds in Iowa and New Hampshire. And she stopped short of endorsing policies championed by Mr. Sanders and others in the liberal wing of the party, including breaking up the big banks and a financial transaction tax, or a government fee on the sale or purchase of certain financial assets.
“She gave something rhetorically to both sides, and she didn’t go too far that either side got uncomfortable,” Mr. Bennett said.
A heckler who interrupted Mrs. Clinton with a question about whether she would reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act seemed to disagree. The act, which Mr. Clinton repealed parts of in 1999 leading to the commingling of commercial and investment banking, is widely criticized by liberals as contributing to the 2008 financial crisis. But Alan S. Blinder, a former White House economic adviser under Mr. Clinton who helped Mrs. Clinton shape her proposals, told Reuters she would not reinstate the 1933 act, which many economists believe is antiquated.
Mrs. Clinton did express her concerns about the emergence of a potentially bigger problem, so-called shadow banking, the system of hedge funds and algorithmic traders that has thrived in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis with little to no government regulation. “Too many of our major financial institutions are still too complex and too risky,” Mrs. Clinton said.
Some of what Mrs. Clinton presented, particularly a plan that would offer companies incentives to increase profit-sharing with employees and that she will pitch in more detail to voters in New Hampshire on Thursday, left some liberal economists skeptical.
“It’s unlikely companies are ever going to give something for nothing,” said Dean Baker, an economist and co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
Other proposals, like raising the federal minimum wage, expanding overtime benefits and promoting equal pay for women, had the feel of a laundry list of standard Democratic proposals advanced by Mr. Obama in his State of the Union address in January.
Predictable or not, the economic vision Mrs. Clinton presented on Monday placed a strong emphasis on the issues she has long advocated, including helping women in the work force by advancing “fair scheduling, paid leave and earned sick days”; providing better access to early childhood education; and addressing rising health care costs.
“I’m well aware that for far too long, these challenges have been dismissed by some as ‘women’s issues,’ “ she said. “Well, those days are over.”
by Ashley Parker and Nick Corasaniti (The New York Times)
WASHINGTON — A Twitter post trecently caught the eye of Bill McKibben, the environmental advocate and godfather of the Keystone XL pipeline protests. It included an image from “The Simpsons” showing Homer and his family basking in mountains of cash in their living room, followed by a report on Hillary Rodham Clinton’s appearing at a fund-raiser with a lobbyist from the Keystone fight.
Mr. McKibben’s environmental organization, 350.org, has been trying to raise awareness about the ties it sees between lobbyists for the oil pipeline and former aides to Mrs. Clinton. He promptly shared the post with his 150,000 Twitter followers, and the reaction was immediate.
“You expect different from a Clinton?” one person responded on Twitter. And from another: “Did you need another reason not to vote for Hillary Clinton?” Lost in the response was the source of the offending tweet. It was not another environmental organization or even a liberal challenger to Mrs. Clinton. Instead, it was a conservative group called America Rising PAC, which is trying, with laserlike focus, to weaken the woman who almost everyone believes will be the Democratic Party’s candidate for president in 2016.
For months now, America Rising has sent out a steady stream of posts on social media attacking Mrs. Clinton, some of them specifically designed to be spotted, and shared, by liberals. The posts highlight critiques of her connections to Wall Street and the Clinton Foundation and feature images of Democrats like Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York, interspersed with cartoon characters and pictures of Kevin Spacey, who plays the villain in “House of Cards.” And as they are read and shared, an anti-Clinton narrative is reinforced.
America Rising is not the only conservative group attacking Mrs. Clinton from the left. Another is American Crossroads, the group started by Karl Rove, which has been sending out its own digital content, including one ad using a speech Ms. Warren gave at the New Populism Conference in Washington last May.
“Powerful interests have tried to capture Washington and rig the system in their favor,” intones Ms. Warren, as images of Mrs. Clinton with foreign leaders flash by.
The new-style digital campaign captures some basic facts about 21st-century communication: Information travels at warp speed on social media, it is sometimes difficult to know where that information comes from, and most people like to read things with which they agree. The result, said Ken Goldstein, a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco who specializes in political advertising, is something more sophisticated.
“Politics is usually basic math,” he said, “and this is a little bit of calculus, thinking a couple steps ahead.”
The tactic is making for some awkward moments online. The A.F.L.-C.I.O. sent to its more than 60,000 followers an America Rising tweet praising its president, Richard L. Trumka, for a speech that was seen as challenging Mrs. Clinton on economic issues, only to take it down a few hours later, saying it was a mistake.
Laura Hart Cole of Verbank, N.Y., whose father, Philip A. Hart, was a senator from Michigan and a liberal icon, was shocked to learn that she had, like Mr. McKibben, shared the meme from America Rising on Twitter. Republican groups, she said, “have a history of sleazy tactics.” But she added: “I guess it’s fair. If what they’re saying is factual, then I guess it’s fair play. It’s a dirty game.”
Conservative strategists and operatives say they are simply filling a vacuum on the far left, as well as applying the lesson they learned in 2012, when they watched in frustration as Mitt Romney was forced to expend time and resources in a protracted primary fight. By the time he secured his party’s nomination, President Obama hardly had to make the case that his opponent was a coldhearted plutocrat; Republicans like Newt Gingrich had already made the argument for him in the primaries.
Few Republicans are more familiar with that nightmare than Matt Rhoades, who was Mr. Romney’s campaign manager. He founded America Rising in response to a recommendation contained in an autopsy of Romney’s failed presidential run that was ordered by the Republican National Committee. The group’s original goal was to compete with American Bridge, the Democratic opposition research group, but its focus under Mr. Rhoades has been to subject Mrs. Clinton to an ordeal similar to Mr. Romney’s.
“The idea is to make her life difficult in the primary and challenge her from the left,” said Colin Reed, America Rising’s executive director. “We don’t want her to enter the general election not having been pushed from the left, so if we have opportunities — creative ways, especially online — to push her from the left, we’ll do it just to show those folks who she needs to turn out that she’s not in line with them.”
No one thinks attacking Mrs. Clinton from the left is likely to turn the most liberal Democrats into Republican voters. But Steven Law, president of American Crossroads, said the goal was simply to erode what should be her natural core of support.
“It can diminish enthusiasm for Hillary among the base over time,” he said. “And if you diminish enthusiasm, lukewarm support can translate into lackluster fund-raising and perhaps diminished turnout down the road.”
This year, Zac Moffatt, a co-founder of Targeted Victory, a right-leaning political technology firm, who handled Mr. Romney’s digital operation and has worked with groups like America Rising and American Crossroads, laid out the strategy in a memo to several clients. “There was a hole to fill in the market,” he said, and if Democrats were not willing to challenge Mrs. Clinton, Republicans could do it themselves.
For example, as Mrs. Clinton was traveling through Las Vegas this month on a campaign swing, “liberal Democrats” (as identified by Targeted Victory’s voter file) in the Las Vegas area saw a video pop into their Facebook news feeds, highlighting recent news reports about foreign government donations to the Clinton Foundation. The video was shared by America Rising and received over 6,300 views, most from people who would never follow a group like America Rising on social media.
Other groups are also using micro-targeted advertising to inject their content into the Facebook and Twitter news feeds of “liberal Democrats,” environmentalists and declared supporters of Ms. Warren, among others.
“You might start looking at union households. You might start looking at Bernie Sanders’s core of support,” Mr. Moffatt said, referring to Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Mr. Law said members of his staff at American Crossroads had easily been able to inhabit the liberal role, despite being fervent Republicans. “We wear these little bracelets — W.W.E.W.D.,” Mr. Law joked, referring to “What would Elizabeth Warren do?”
In the face of Republican activity aimed at undermining its liberal support, the Clinton campaign has been publicly circumspect. Asked for a comment, it would only note that in aQuinnipiac University poll last month, Mrs. Clinton led her closest opponent, Mr. Sanders, by 46 points among voters who consider themselves “very liberal.”
And even some of those unhappy with Mrs. Clinton, like Joel Gombiner of Brooklyn — who posted the “Did you need another reason?” response to the Twitter message shared by Mr. McKibben — think the conservative groups may be outsmarting themselves.
“They view this as a means of weakening the Democratic Party and weakening the chance in a presidential election,” said Mr. Gombiner, 26. But “that’s the whole point of a democracy, that the arguments make you stronger.”
by AMY CHOZICKAPRIL (The New York Times)
It was a favorite riposte of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s in her 2008 presidential campaign: “I always wonder what part of the 1990s they didn’t like,” she would say about critics who brought up her husband’s administration, “the peace or the prosperity?”
Now, as the streets of Baltimore erupt in protests, and questions about race, poverty and the prison population suddenly tower over the political landscape, the halcyon years of the tough-on-crime Bill Clinton administration look less idyllic.
Mrs. Clinton delivered a poignant assessment of the cycle of poverty and incarceration on Wednesday in addressing the deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of white police officers. But the most striking part of her speech was the unsaid but implicit rebuttal of her husband’s 1994 crime bill, which flooded America’s cities with more police officers, built dozens of new prisons and created tougher penalties for drug offenders.
Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said Wednesday that he was “detecting a little pattern” in reporters’ questions about possible policy disagreements between Hillary Rodham Clinton and the president.
Indeed, in her call to “end the era of mass incarceration,” she appeared to take an important step toward redefining what it means to be a Clinton Democrat.
If the centrist policies of the Bill Clinton years were known for stepped-up policing and prison building, deficit reduction, deregulation, welfare overhaul and trade deals, Mrs. Clinton is steering her early candidacy in the opposite direction, emphasizing economic populism, poverty alleviation and, in the criminal justice system, rehabilitation over incarceration.
Two decades ago, Mr. Clinton urged the poor to take personal responsibility and embraced wealthy corporate leaders, who create jobs, as an important part of the solution to poverty. Now, Mrs. Clinton wants government to help working families with everything from child care to college debt. And though she has long been attacked from the left as overly solicitous of Wall Street, she has not minced words of late in blaming the wealthy for an economy that, she says, has left too many people behind.
“How many children climb out of poverty and stay out of prison?” she asked Wednesday. “That’s how we should measure prosperity.” She added: “That is a far better measurement than the size of the bonuses handed out in downtown office buildings.”
How Mrs. Clinton will define her political philosophy is still very much an open question — not only because she is not her husband, as her supporters note, but because the times, and the country, have changed.
When Mr. Clinton first ran for president, Democrats had lost five out of the previous six presidential elections. Crack cocaine was ravaging American cities, and Democrats were freshly scarred by the Willie Horton ad with which the elder George Bush portrayed Michael Dukakis as soft on violent crime.
Today, an attack ad seeking to touch an emotional chord with voters could conceivably feature a rogue police officer victimizing a black man.
Then, the electorate was more than 80 percent white, and Democrats battled a reputation as soft on crime and too willing to give “handouts” to welfare recipients. Mr. Clinton, calling himself a “New Democrat,” promised to put more police officers on the streets and end a cycle of government dependency associated with the poorest Americans.
“The distance between 1968 and 1992 is the same distance between 1992 and today,” said Matt Bennett, a former Clinton administration aide and a senior vice president at the centrist Third Way think tank. “Would Bill Clinton do what L.B.J. did?”
Still, Mrs. Clinton confronts the delicate task of distancing herself from policies that as first lady she either supported or dutifully stood behind.
In 1996, for example, Mrs. Clinton angered activists including her friend Marian Wright Edelman, with whom she had worked at the Children’s Defense Fund, when she stood by her husband’s overhaul of the welfare system, which cut federal assistance to the poor by nearly $55 billion over six years.
But while Mr. Clinton’s brand of politics was closely associated with the strategist Al From and his centrist Democratic Leadership Council, Mrs. Clinton’s economic approach in 2016 has tilted discernably to the left. Whether she is being pulled there by Senator Elizabeth Warren and others, or is following her own natural inclinations, Mrs. Clinton is steeping herself in liberal thinking, thanks to advisers like the progressive economists Joseph E. Stiglitz and Alan B. Krueger.
“You’re seeing a wide group of prominent Democrats more or less articulating this question” of economic inequality, said Felicia Wong, president and chief executive of the Roosevelt Institute, a liberal think tank with which Mr. Stiglitz is affiliated. “Whether they’re collectively the new Democratic Leadership Council, I don’t know.”
Still, Mr. From argued in an interview that, though the circumstances had changed, Mrs. Clinton’s underlying goals were no different than those of her husband’s administration.
“The context was different on poverty and crime in the cities,” he said. “But the central tenet of our philosophy was that nobody in America should work full time to support a family and be poor.”
Bruce Reed, who was Mr. Clinton’s chief domestic policy adviser, said centrism on crime and welfare, in a word, worked: “It was more important to make progress than to just have a debate that went nowhere.”
Both the poverty rate and violent crime rate fell significantly during the Clinton years. But as the crisis in Baltimore has laid bare, some policies that showed success at the time have since had an adverse impact. And Mrs. Clinton’s supporters say she will not shrink from acknowledging as much — on crime, the economy, or a range of other issues.
“They understand what has been happening in this country, not only in the lead-up to the financial crisis in 2008, but the causes of that bubble,” said Ms. Wong, who was a fellow in Mr. Clinton’s White House. “She and her team really recognize that some of those policies just didn’t work out.”
By Anne Gearan (The Washington Post)
In a sign of the power of the populist current among Democrats this election cycle, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign is hiring a former top federal regulator known for trying to tighten rules and requirements on Wall Street.
Former Commodity Futures Trading Commission chairman Gary Gensler will be the campaign’s chief financial officer, a Democrat with knowledge of the hire said Friday. Gensler’s role was first reported by Bloomberg.
Gensler clashed repeatedly with Wall Street firms, and his hiring is a clear signal to progressive Democrats and others who have rallied to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and her attacks on Wall Street.
Although Warren has said she will not run for president in 2016, she remains the favorite among a powerful minority of activists whose backing Clinton badly wants. Warren herself has said she wants to know more about what Clinton will run on, and has pressed for strong progressive voices to be among those advising the Democratic frontrunner.
Even progressives backing Clinton now want her to demonstrate independence from big corporations and Wall Street, and Clinton appears to be listening. On Tuesday, Clinton used her first campaign appearance to decry income inequality between average American workers and CEOs.
“There’s something wrong when hedge fund managers pay less in taxes than nurses or the truckers I saw on I-80,” she added, in a a reference to her trip by van from New York to Iowa.
Clinton’s aides and outside defenders say her reputation as close to Wall Street owes mostly to her history as a New York senator and that she will not show favoritism now. Still, she is expected to raise millions from people involved in financial services industries.
Gensler was a main driver of the financial rules that became known as the Dodd-Frank Act, which the Obama administration supported. The package became law in 2010, as the nation struggled to recover from the great recession caused partly by fraud and bad practices among financial firms.
“I think it’s fair to say that if you look across the country, the deck is stacked in favor of those already at the top,” Clinton said during her remarks at a rural community college in Iowa.
That “stacked deck” reference echoed the populist theme of the video she released Sunday to announce her campaign, and also echoes a frequent theme Warren stresses.
by Philip Bump (The Washington Post)
A bit of sunlight poking through the darkness on Wall Street (jk there is no darkness on Wall Street): The average bonus for a Wall Street employee ticked up again in 2014, hitting $172,860 according to analysis from the New York state comptroller. That sum isn’t a recent peak; before the recession, Wall Streeters were getting $225,000 in 2014 dollars.
That’s enough to give the maximum 2014 contribution to 66 members of Congress, should the Wall Streer bonusers have wanted to. And seeing as how contributions from the finance, insurance and real estate industries in 2014 hit nearly half a billion dollars, it’s safe to assume that some of this cash will make its way to Washington. (It may also explain why Jeb Bush just hired a Wall Street executive to help guide his campaign policy)
The $172,860 figure may not be a recent peak, but it is still more than three times the median household income in America. And that’s just the bonus — not the salaries these Wall Street workers earn.
Another comparison to regular America: The average Wall Street bonus used to be about one-ninth of the median price of a new home. These days, two Wall Streeters could pool their bonuses and buy a house together, and have some money left over. (Not a house near Wall Street, mind you, but the $172,000 would certainly cover a lot of the rent.)
If Jeb actually did want to hit the much-pooh-poohed $100 million fundraising goal, he’d only need 579 Wall Street workers to turn over their bonuses. Last year alone, Wall Street added 2,300 new employees. So maybe raising $100 million isn’t as hard as it looked.
The Amazing Democrats 