Hillary, the ultimate deck stacker, to campaign against deck stacking

Hillary, the ultimate deck stacker, to campaign against deck stacking

It’s interesting that Hillary Clinton started off her 2016 presidential campaign with a video that showed what appeared to be middle class Americans at a transitional point in their lives. Hillary talked about being a “champion” for them and punctuated her kick-off by going on a road trip to Iowa, stopping at gas stations and eating at Chipotle, like “every day” Americans.

While people have been enjoying themselves at Hillary’s expense with her road trip and her burrito bowl adventures, the Republican Party is looking to do what Democrats did to Mitt Romney in 2012 and what the GOP did to John Kerry in 2004: Portray Hillary Clinton as an out of touch plutocrat who says all the right things about “the middle class” but cannot possibly relate to their situation. From Politico:

While Hillary Clinton’s residences in New York and Washington may not have car elevators, there’s still a lengthy trail of paid speeches, tone-deaf statements about the family finances and questions about Clinton family foundation fundraising practices that will serve as cornerstones of the anti-Clinton messaging effort.

“She’s admitted she hasn’t driven a car for decades; she probably doesn’t ever go into a coffee shop and talk to regular people unless it’s for a staged photo-op,” said American Crossroads CEO Steven Law, alluding to Clinton’s portrayal in her campaign’s launch video on Sunday. “She really has lived the life of a 1-percenter these last several years, and it shows.

Even the back story of when she decided to run is filled with imagery that her campaign team is worried about:

Around Christmas, Hillary Rodham Clinton set off on her annual holiday vacation at Oscar de la Renta’s beachfront estate in the Dominican Republic.

Her staff will likely try to frame the trip as something of necessity since de la Renta had recently passed away and she was there to spend time with the mourning widow except that it says this was an annual vacation trip for herself.

Yesterday, Hillary attacked the financial system as favoring those at the top:

“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,” she said at a roundtable in an auto tech lab at Kirkwood Community College. “There’s something wrong when CEOs make 300 times more than the American worker … There’s something wrong when American workers keep getting more productive … but that productivity is not matched in their paychecks.”

And, the former secretary of state continued, “there’s something wrong when hedge fund managers pay less in taxes than nurses or the truckers I saw on I-80” while driving from New York to Iowa over the past two days.

“Deck-stacking” is also a theme in her campaign launch video:

Her rhetoric however, doesn’t match the relationship with the very institutions she is now bashing. A cursory review of donations to her (through 2008, the most recent data available) have all come from Wall Street investment firms, banks and entertainment companies. From OpenSecrets:

The donations from Kirkland & Ellis are ironic considering it’s the law firm where former Independent Counsel Ken Starr was a partner.

People on Wall Street don’t even believe her new found populism:

Down on Wall Street they don’t believe it for a minute. While the finance industry does genuinely hate Warren, the big bankers love Clinton, and by and large they badly want her to be president. Many of the rich and powerful in the financial industry—among them, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman, Tom Nides, a powerful vice chairman at Morgan Stanley, and the heads of JPMorganChase and Bank of America—consider Clinton a pragmatic problem-solver not prone to populist rhetoric. To them, she’s someone who gets the idea that we all benefit if Wall Street and American business thrive. What about her forays into fiery rhetoric? They dismiss it quickly as political maneuvers. None of them think she really means her populism.

Hillary has a problem. She’s no longer the wife of a Governor from a small southern state heading to the White House. She’s a rich, well off, DC insider who charges $300,000 to speak at a university (flatly rejecting a request to reduce her fee) and has demands such as pillow type and water temperature expectations. She decries financial institutions and Wall Street yet her history shows just how friendly she is to those industries and how some are eager for her to be President.

Her and her team (as well as her surrogates in the media) will try their best to diminish all of this, but in this day and age, where news changes by the minute, they’ll have their hands full keeping all of this from being an issue.

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