It is fascinating to watch and of course Mark Halperin would be at the tip of the spear of this bullshit. According to him and his interlocutor here, Hillary Clinton is “terrified of the left”. Setting up this narrative of Clinton vs “The Left” is all about demonizing “The Left” and its ideas in a way that Halperin would never do for the Tea Party — who are demonstrably dangerous. Which might be why he feels that he can do this — there’s no downside to him for taking sides against “The Left”. He won’t be the only one, of course, but this is the first I’ve seen of this narrative in the wild this cycle.
One of the presidential primary narratives that will emerge over the next year will be Hillary Clinton‘s fight to court progressives who are skeptical of her on a variety of key economic and foreign policy issues. Bloomberg TV host and political analyst Mark Halperin thinks her fear of the left is starting to show, even this early in her campaign.
Asked by his With All Due Respect co-host John Heilemann whether Clinton has succeeded thus far in “balancing the center and the left,” Halperin said: “I do not think it is going well. My supposition is that she is so terrified of losing Iowa, she is forgetting the fact that there is a general election to come. She is terrified of the left and it is showing on a range of issues.”
I wish she was really terrified of the left. That might be a campaign to get behind. But I (cynically, to be sure) think she is in co-opting mode right now — and it’s smart, really. The most interesting and resonant concerns right now among voters are basically Left Dem ones (witness the attempted co-opting of the income inequality idea by the GOP, who clearly couldn’t give a damn about that). She *should* be in the business of speaking to those concerns and talking about effective policy to address those. She *should* be asking for all of the Democratic party votes and is in the best position of all to re-orient the debate to the concerns of middle class, working class and poor people who are feeling all of the pain right now. The love letter from Hillary to Elizabeth Warren in Time magazine and the hiring of Gary Gensler as her campaign’s CFO could be taken as signals that she is taking the burdens of the most of Americans seriously. But then, we have this bit of business from Politico (sorry gang), specifically noting that her backers from the 1% have gotten the wink.
And then there’s Martin O’Malley who is saying much of the right stuff:
He derided what he called the Republican-championed theory of “trickle-down economics,” which he said was marked by tax cuts that benefit the very rich, deregulation, and policies meant to keep wages low.
‘We made record investments in education to make our schools the best in the nation.’
The former Baltimore mayor, speaking with a mostly even, slow cadence, portrayed the current economic picture as wealth concentrated among a relative few and a wide gap between the ultra-wealthy and everyone else.
And he offered a series of policy proposals to change the economic status quo.
They included raising the minimum wage and indexing it to inflation; expanding Social Security benefits; making it easier for workers to organize and collectively bargain; restoring “accountability” to financial markets; and no longer “entering into bad trade deals,” which he said include the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership.
He also framed reform of immigration laws — creating a path to citizenship for people in the United States illegally — as an action that would boost the economy.
A narrative of Hillary vs O’Malley might force her very cautious hand. But a narrative of Hillary vs Progressives is just about making Progressives into bad guys. And continues the ongoing bamboozlement of Mark Halperin — and how does that guy keep a job, anyway?