Hillary Clinton has been
hitting populist notes and
prioritizing paid leave in the opening days of her presidential campaign, drawing some suggestions that she's cynically trying to appeal to progressives by echoing popular figures like Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Now, Clinton's camp is
pushing back against the assumption that she represents the centrist-to-conservative economic policies her husband embraced in the 1990s.
“This perception comes because she wasn’t involved in the discussion for so long,” Anita Dunn, a Democratic strategist, said of Mrs. Clinton. Because, she added, in the White House “she had this reputation as being the very left-wing, liberal, Elizabeth Warren type.”
Fair enough. But the discussion changed while Clinton was occupied with foreign policy, and now she has to re-establish herself. Pointing back to stuff like this is good:
“Let’s finally do something about the growing inequality that is tearing our country apart,” Mrs. Clinton said during her campaign, appearing at the Take Back America conference, a gathering of liberal groups, in June 2007. “The top 1 percent of our households hold 22 percent of our nation’s wealth. Enough with corporate welfare. Enough with golden parachutes. And enough with the tax incentives for companies to shift jobs overseas.”
But demonstrating that a new Clinton presidency will fight inequality and crack down on Wall Street won't be just a matter of producing a few quotes—from now or from then. It'll be about consistency, about the concrete policies she proposes as the campaign goes on, about making her Wall Street donors
nervous as they start to believe she means it, about who she surrounds herself with (where a
hire like this is a good sign). Clinton starts with advantages of name recognition, a supporter base, and tons of fundraising potential. Having to define herself for 2016 over all the built-in assumptions about where she stands on the issues may be part of the downside to all that upside, but if she's serious about fighting inequality and corporate welfare, it won't be too hard to let us know.