This column by Jill Abramson is remarkable. Abramson was a strong supporter of Hillary Clinton, but in this column, she says things she wouldn't have said before Clinton's defeat. First, she points out that Clinton was bought and paid for by the super-rich:
Hillary Clinton chose a bitterly ironic party location to thank her massive donor network last week: the grand ballroom of The Plaza, once owned by Donald Trump.
The people gathered for the glum get-together, including hedge fund managers and media titans, had built the most formidable fundraising network ever seen in American politics. They pumped more than $4bn into various Clinton campaigns and related political and charitable groups over four decades. Many of them have been cutting huge checks since Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign in 1992.
In 2016, they expected their $1.2bn infusion to catapult Hillary Clinton back into the White House and were astonished, like the rest of the country’s elite, to see all that money go down the tubes.
Next, she shows how sleazy and money-hungry the Clintons are:
Back in 1991, I was one of the only reporters with Bill Clinton at one of his early Hollywood shakedowns. I saw how he loved schmoozing with rich people, how his body language literally changed as he mixed with the ultra-rich. We were in the Beverly Hills mansion of movie producer Mike Medavoy, whose home actually had a chandelier hanging in the outdoor patio.
I was told later by campaign aides that Hillary Clinton had particularly hated the piece I wrote, on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, pointing out how the couple stitched every station of their lives, from Yale Law School to the once-famous Renaissance Weekends they attended on New Year’s Eve, into a fundraising juggernaut. She said the story made them look like “we were using our friends”.
But Bill and Hillary Clinton are the people responsible for turning the Democratic party into the party of Wall Street and their glitzy friends. During his time in office, Bill Clinton did little to change a campaign finance system that has always been fundamentally at odds with the party’s egalitarian message.
Finally, she admits that Hillary Clinton had no interest in helping the ordinary people of this country. The free-trade deals signed into law by her husband (and which she supported) do little to help the poor and working classes, but enrich the already wealthy:
Hillary Clinton did not have a cogent economic message. This was the most serious failing of her campaign. It is also the biggest challenge facing the Democratic party as it tries to rebuild with an alliance of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren liberals and the financiers who have funded the party since Bill Clinton’s victory in 1992.
Of course, the Sanders-Warren economic message is at war with Wall Street interests. So who owns the economic ideas that must rejuvenate the Democrats as Trump and his new cabinet try to rip apart the social programs that are the signature accomplishments of Democratic presidents from Johnson to Obama?
How will the Democrats approach trade, another issue that deeply divides Wall Street donors from the Democratic rank and file. Perhaps most important, who are the best thinkers and activists who can begin to answer these questions?
Say what you will about Donald Trump. Hillary Clinton would have been a disaster for this country. Thank God she lost. She and Bill can now get on with accumulating wealth, which has been their driving concern since law school. (Has anyone explained to them that you can't take it with you?)
