Populist drivel attracts Clinton

If there’s one thing Americans should have learned all the way back to FDR is that populist rhetoric doesn’t offer solutions, yet here we are in the Democrat primaries and the moon-eyed wantwits of Ohio are lapping up the populist pablum now from Clinton (Washington Post link);

Eager to recapture the white, working-class voters who favored her in some of the early primaries but who have since shifted to Sen. Barack Obama, Clinton traded her usual wonky style this weekend for a fiery, populist tone in speeches in Ohio, Texas and Rhode Island.

Instead of giving precise policy details, she repeatedly pointed her finger skyward, declared that Americans “got shafted under President Bush” and cast herself as a fighter, as Edwards often described himself, promising to help most Americans, not just the “wealthy and the connected.”

In an appearance here Sunday afternoon, she mocked Obama’s hopeful rhetoric, declaring that it is not the answer to fighting entrenched interests.

“I could stand up here and say, ‘Let’s just get everybody together, let’s get unified, the sky will open, the light will come down, celestial choirs will be singing, and everyone will know we should do the right thing and the world will be perfect,’ ” she said, as people cheered and laughed. “You are not going to wave a magic wand and have the special interests disappear.”

The Wall Street Journal reports Clinton getting down in the populist mud looking for sob stories;

Wendy Clardy, a 43-year-old mother of three teenage boys, raised her hand and told the audience about how she lost her home to foreclosure. “They took me to the courts and took away our home,” she said.

A sympathetic Sen. Clinton laid out her plans for a 90-day moratorium on home foreclosures, a five-year interest-rate freeze on adjustable-rate mortgages and a $30 billion fund that would go directly to counties affected by the mortgage crisis. “That’s a big difference between me and my opponent, who doesn’t agree with me,” Sen. Clinton said, adding, “But lo and behold, last week even the Bush Administration said maybe she’s onto something; maybe we should have a moratorium.”

But a simple search turns up this story by Wendy Clardy who admits that her foreclosure happened in 2004 and had been a legal problem for her since 2002 – five years before the current so-called crisis began. Is it a terrible story? Yes, but it’s outside of the context of Clinton’s speech – and Clardy appears to be some sort of activist for housing issues. So it turns out that Clardy might be another of Clinton’s plants.

The Washington Post catches Clinton copying John Edwards;

“Whatever happens, we’re going to be fine. . . . I just hope that we’ll be able to say the same thing about the American people, and that’s what this election should be about,” she said.

At a Dec. 13 debate, Edwards said: “All of us are going to be just fine, no matter what happens in this election. But what’s at stake is whether America is going to be fine.”

Didn’t the Clinton campaign call that plagiarism when Obama did it? From Robert Novak;

I listened in on last Wednesday’s news media conference calls by Clinton campaign managers Mark Penn and Harold Ickes in the wake of her Wisconsin drubbing. Incredibly, they were hawking the same plagiarism charge that had just proved ineffective. Clinton herself raised the bogus issue again at Thursday night’s debate in Austin and was rewarded with boos from the Democratic audience.

I wonder who thinks that these are all good ideas.

Category: Politics