Conundrum: Use Hillary and Liz’s class warfare tactics against them?
They are the types of money grubbers they accuse Republicans of being.
Hillary Clinton is the presumptive Democratic nominee, if she wants it. Her recent sloppy and shallow interview performances, however, show that she might be vulnerable should a credible challenger arise.
The credible challenger could be Elizabeth Warren, the darling of the progressive wing of the liberal party.
Class warfare must be one of the central themes of any Democratic presidential campaign. Together with dividing people by race, sex, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. The Democrats have many cards to play, and they will.
So how will the class warfare theme play out with either Hillary or Warren at the top of the ticket?
Hillary’s 8-figure cash-in has been in the news since she claimed to be “dead broke” upon leaving the White House with Bill. We debunked that story line completely, 2001 was Hillary’s Year of Great Fortune, not of being “dead broke”.
Warren’s finances have not been as much in the news lately, but there is a story to be told. From her 8-figure net worth, to her exorbitant salary as a professor (subsidized by tuition funded with student loans), to her house flipping, to her large legal fees representing large corporations against the little guy, to her penny-pinching of the court system on document access fees, Elizabeth Warren’s wealth accumulation could be an issue because she makes other people’s wealth accumulation an issue. Her Cambridge home apparently is quite the thing, so much so that her Senate campaign reportedly required that reporters interviewing her at home treat the home itself as off the record.
So there is a case to be made that each of the two likely Democratic Party presidential nominees are the types of money grubbers they accuse Republicans of being.
So should we go there?
Isn’t wealth accumulation, so long as done lawfully, a good thing? Do we really want to play the class warfare game against the two class warriors, and thereby legitimize the tactic?
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Yes, we should go there, especially when they’re using their crony connection to accumulate wealth with the help of corrupt government. I am suspicious of the motives of those conservatives who hesitate to go there.
Assuming there is a crony connection to her wealth, yes. The winning theme could be “hasn’t she profited enough from her political connections?”
Agree. WRT the Clintons’ amassed fortune, are there really that many organizations wanting to pay 200K to a half mil for 45-minute speech? Or is that just the pretext for payola.
YOU BETCHA!
Lizzie Warren claiming to be Dead Broke???
“Warren’s net worth as of the end of 2011 was …$14.5 million” – http://elizabethwarrenwiki.org/income-and-net-worth/ (FROM THE PROF’S LINK ABOVE.)
Whatever works. I mean it. Ask Truth Revolt; that’s their forte.
Note that charges brought up by one Democrat against another will be considered improper if used against a Republican. Also note that Hilary became Senator partly because Rick Lazio was regarding as “bullying the poor lady” in the debate.
Whatever works. Use it. Just make sure it doesn’t backfire.
Sorry – if used by a Republican.
Nothing used against a Republican can ever be improper, of course.
“Do we really want to play the class warfare game against the two class warriors, and thereby legitimize the tactic?”
Slightly confused, here, Prof.
Pointing out their grinding hypocrisy is NOT the same as playing “class warfare”.
We can say with deadly earnest that we wish everyone could live the life of a Clinton or Warren, and we aspire to create a nation where that is MORE possible for ALL people.
What THEY aspire to do is cut the ladder off from their position of ascendency.
The Collective is the enemy of true wealth creation and the middle class. It always has been.
The answer to question posed depends on who “WE” are.
We, the official voice of the GOP?
We, the super pacs?
We, the conservative media?
We, the conservative activists/bloggers/twitterers?
We, the conservative intellectuals?
We, the conservative pundits?
We, the DC RINO lawmaker elites?
We, the concerned conservative voters?
Personally, I studied that question back in June 2008 as the primary got underway between Hillary & Barack.
I decided then to go with using the progressives’ Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals tactics on the progressives’ heroes.
Not.Sorry.
She also reportedly gouged poor relatives in OK over real estate. They made cracks to the press about her usury and taking advantage of their circumstances. I’m sure there are some great stories there. Her ascent up the greasy poll has Wendy Davis elements but she isn’t quite as flashy with it. Davis out of the trailer park and Warren out of the teepee have certain similarities. These fairy tales won’t work everywhere.
It is quite appropriate to use #Occupy tactics against those 1%-ers who claim to support the 99%
Make them live up to their rhetoric.
Delegitimize the messenger you delegitimize the message. The Dem’s do it all the time. i.e., The Tea Party is racist, so there message is therefore their message of limited government, and sane fiscal policy is racist. The Dem’s focus their message to the “Low Information Voters” who unfortunately determine many elections. We are in the middle of a “Cold Civil War”. In war, this is a legitimate tactic. Unfortunately, winning is the only high ground. (A 4-5 of years ago I would have agreed with you.)
No conundrum. Rather, a new comic book genre has evolved: class warfare.
Exhibits A & B:
Elizabeth Warren’s A Frightening Chance and Hillary Clinton’s Lard Choices.
Let them fight it out tooth and nail and let’s see who the Biggest Loser is.
“Let them fight it out tooth and nail and let’s see who the Biggest Loser is.”
I like your style. My money would be on Hillary. I don’t think Warren is fully steeped in the nastines of the Dem party quite yet. She’s still new at this. But Hillary has a lifetime of political infighting under her belt.
Either way, I’d pay money to watch that match. What remained of the winner after they were done savaging each other would be an easy knock-off for Republicans.
Say what? Warren can lie and demagogue with the best of them. She plays the holier than thou financial card even as she is price gouging, penny pinching, making a lawyerly buck without a law license, fudging the content of papers she writes, creating a false genealogy, and engaging in heaven knows what other kinds of chicanery. The woman is a classic Democrat. The next thing we’ll find out is that she’s been putting horns on her husband,
Senator Warren climbed up the professorial ladder by means of racial preferences, claiming to be part Native American. She was listed as ‘minority faculty, Native American’ by Pennsylvania and Harvard, and undoubtedly enjoyed hiring preferences over mere European-American competitors.
A diligent search of ancestry records, even more diligently not reported by the media, turned up no evidence of such ‘good breeding’. In fact, one of her ancestors was known for shooting Cherokees. She also refused to meet with two registered Cherokess who wished to discuss the subject with her, during her run for the Senate.
She cuts a great figure, sneering at capitalism through fawning media microphones. But her heels came from an ancestor named Achilles.
Can’t someone challenge her to prove her Indian ancestry by genetic testing? However, she would probably obtain a blood sample from a real Indian and cheat.
There are certain real Indians who have challenged her ancestry. The story is out.
Probably not. Her claim is 1/32 (g-g-g-grandmother), and she most likely has 46 chromosomes. Unless the claim was entirely maternal (it is apparently through her mother), in which case, she would have American Indian/Asian, and not European mitochondrial DNA.
The interesting thing here is that most colleges don’t seem to give admissions preference to 1/8 verifiable Cherokee (g-grandmother), and here we have a 1/32 claim based purely on family tradition used by Texas, Penn, and Harvard as justification for publicly listing her as a person of color. Despite allegedly having maybe 1 or 2 out of 46 nuclear chromosomes from that g-g-g-grandmother. 1/32 is 3.125%.
I’m with Rags – it’s all about exposing their hypocrisy.
The key is to do it in such a way that you don’t look like you’re attacking a woman for trying to “break the glass ceiling” – it is to juxtapose their words with their homes (no off the record nonsense!) and their lifestyles with their speeches.
It can work. If done correctly.
Okay, so we’ve now established that no Republican can do this…
pointing it out is not bad, after all she is an indian giver….
Professor, it is not our fault they have been allowed to set the rules. Let us play by the rules they established. To to otherwise would be foolish.
And to DO otherwise would be foolish, too.
Nice guys finish last.
We go there. That is why we are in the mess we are in because we have let the left lie, cheat, steal, threaten, destroy property and just rolled our eyes and said how crass.
If Romney had stopped the CNN interview and said to Candy Cowley, Hold on that is a lie and I want us to pause while my assistant over there looks it up on youtube so the public can see the truth. If she objected, then say I don’t care that you object you have given up your right for full moderation when you are trying to bias this debate for obviously your candidate. I will no condone protecting your candidate and covering up for him any longer.
I am sure it could have been said better but frankly enough is enough the left has shrilled their lies so long they think it is their right to do so. I have seen a couple on tv now that they are being pushed on it and their eyes gapped like fish. They could not believe anyone after all these years would call them on it.
So yes we go there and we start kicking their behinds until the facists (progressives) crawl back under the rocks they were hiding under.
Romney wasn’t a fighter. He didn’t attack Tyrant Obama the Liar which was needed in order to win the presidency.
The only GOP pol who attacked Obama straight out of the gate was Palin, and McCain tried to stick a sock in her mouth. Those in Congress are still blinded by the color of his skin.
It’s the hypocrisy not the class warfare that is to be emphasized.
Also, looking into Warren’s charitable giving could be a mother load of an issue. Liberals do not spend their own money, they spend other people’s money. The always lag far behind conservatives in generosity. Thus, it may be possible to paint a credible picture of a rich hypocrite black-hearted Scrooge making deceitful accusations against those who have made it with their own blood, sweat and tears and, unlike Warren, are willing to share some of it with the less fortunate.
Not that I’d ever vote for her, but in the interests of broadening political discourse, I can suggest a theme song for her:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzrOMXOJwjE
Here’s an interesting fact–do you know what Liz Warren and Jim Jones (yes, THAT Jim Jones) have in common? If you read the Wikipedia entry for Jones, you will learn that he also falsely claimed to be part Cherokee! So that’s one attribute that Liz shares with the communist, genocidal, race-baiting, class-baiting, maniacal, self-absorbed cult leader. Perhaps more than one, actually…
Sure. Go after them for being hypocrites.
I see no reason why the tactics of divisiveness and class warfare that the left/libs have perfected long since shouldn’t be turned around on them. The only caveat should be that attacks against them should be true and factual, not the lies they deal in so easily.
Yes we should do so but I am not confident that we will. To do so means an absolute and total commitment to victory at any cost – something the Republican Party has never been committed to in the past 20 years or so.