(56H)
One group that appears to be ready for Hillary is the vast array of lobbyist known as “K” street. Lobbyist are pledging their allegiance and making clear they will do whatever they can to help her become the first in command.
In 2008 she raised about $230 million for the primary battle alone. Romney raised $450 million. The GOP has another problem with Hillary: in the last quarter-century it has exhibited no facility for countering Clintonism in the public mind. Republicans have had three at-bats against the Clintons—the elections of ’92-’96 and the impeachment proceeding of ’98-99 and struck out every time.
The party should try to occupy the same political space the Clintons seized in ’92 and cast the Clintons in the role of the out-of-touch elitist. And then there’s Bill’s appetite for the rock-star lifestyle. Hillary’s presumably endless grasping for campaign contributions form the likes of Goldman Sachs Lloyd Blankfein is already on board for Hillary. It should in theory, be possible for the GOP to expose the hypocrisy of the Clintons pitch to the “forgotten middle class”, given that they seemingly have forgotten all about their own middle-class backgrounds.
They should consider a candidate who has not spent much time in DC, somebody whose parents struggled to reach the middle class, someone who has had to work hard in the last 20 years to retain that status, somebody who is, if not hip, at least relatively young (the younger candidate has won the popular vote in the 6 presidential elections. One cannot overstate the power of symbolism in a presidential election. The republicans should find a candidate who seems more empathetic than Hillary.
Remember back at the ’92 convention, Bill said—there is not a program in government for every problem and if we want to use government to help people, we have got to make it work again—a reply to Sister Souljah.
Meanwhile Clinton mentioned “work’, “working” or “hard work” 29 times in his ’92 address, no longer would it be the party of the radicals, the grievance mongers, or those blindly pushing government for its own sake. Party that wields government to help people who are already working hard! A plurality identified unemployment as the number one problem. They also claimed that Obama’s policy favored the middle class over the rich. A 55% majority of voters said that the “US economic system favors the wealthy”.
Romney hoped to use his background in business to his advantage but the exit polling indicates that it worked against him. This gave Obama enormous political cover to sidle up to his elite supporters, who enjoyed tremendous payoffs via the stimulus OBC, and Dodd-Frank. The Clintons will probably do likewise. They will spend money donated by Goldman, ads decrying the influence of corporations like Goldman all the while assuming that the GOP’s psychological connection with business will mask their blatant hypocrisy. The party has to find a way to signal to voters that, contrary to their expectations the GOP will not govern as though it is in the pocket of corporate interests. After all the dems do not simply regulate mandate like Dodd-Frank maintenance of “too big to fail”. Dems might spend half their time regulating business, but they spend the other half providing rents to businesses, at least those with high-powered lobbyist once employed by the Clinton adm. GOP past wrongs, a full-throated renunciation of the old practices, an unequivocal promise that a republican adm will teat people equally, regardless of how much money they spend on lobbyist and a reform agenda that seeks to embed these virtues in the law.
If the party wants to defeat them, it needs to throw the old strategies out the window and come up with something new.
Source—weekly standard, jay cost, the hill