Hillary’s latest ‘oops’ — hitting the top 1%
What Mitt Romney was in 2011, Hillary Clinton may be in 2015 — a dominating candidate with an authenticity problem whose solution is to take Foot A and carefully insert it into Mouth B.
The latest example came in Tuesday’s New York Times, when reporter Amy Chozick revealed that Mrs. Clinton had told a group of economists that “the economy required a ‘toppling’ of the wealthiest 1 percent.”
A “toppling”? Really?
That’s a word associated with violent revolutions. It’s so extreme and bizarre that it reads like a parody of itself. She doesn’t mean it, of course.
Most of her life is spent exclusively in the company of the very people whom she said she wishes to “topple,” and it’s a simple truism that any normal person does not choose to associate with people of whom she disapproves and wishes to see laid low.
And this is where she reminds me of Mitt, although she has an infinitely easier path to her party’s nomination than he ever had.
Remember when Romney attempted to demonstrate his right-wing bona fides by declaring himself “severely conservative” — a phrase no actual conservative would ever have used to characterize his own views?
Remember when he needed to firm up anti-immigration types and so called upon 11 million illegals to “self-deport” — a weirdly Dr. Evil-like phrase whose wording suggested even he didn’t believe it?
Romney thought it would help to demonstrate his right-wing credentials by saying things that sounded as though they had been written by a left-winger trying to imagine what awful things a right-winger would say about himself.
They didn’t help. They only made him seem like a man wearing a costume.
In the same way, Hillary the Toppler is making herself sound like Madame Defarge, the merciless revolutionary of Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities” of whom Dickens says: “It was nothing to her, that an innocent man was to die for the sins of his forefathers; she saw, not him, but them.
“It was nothing to her, that his wife was to be made a widow and his daughter an orphan; that was insufficient punishment, because they were her natural enemies and her prey, and as such had no right to live.”
Remember, I’m not the one summoning up Madame Defarge; Hillary Clinton has done it to herself — which is why you know and I know and everybody else knows this radical populist nonsense is totally disingenuous.
And why? Because she knows she looks more like Marie Antoinette these days than a Jacobin on the barricades.
Hillary Clinton shouldn’t need to burnish her left-wing credentials. Twenty years ago, she was considered the liberal conscience of her husband’s White House.
And yet here she is. She has spent the last 15 years as a voice of liberal corporatism, not of Occupy Wall Street.
Before moving to the White House, Hillary Clinton was very much a creature of the upper middle class — a successful lawyer married to a politician who made $35,000 a year.
Since then, she has literally transcended class. It’s likely she has not driven a car in 23 years, or carried a bag.
Her commercial flight back from Iowa last week is almost certainly one of the very few commercial flights she has taken since 1992.
Her husband has earned at least $150 million since 2001. Between a book deal and speeches, she has made something like $20 million since leaving Foggy Bottom in 2013.
So whom exactly is Hillary Clinton going to lead the revolution against? Herself?
She might as well have called herself “severely left-wing.” She might as well have called for her own “self-toppling.”
Her sheer inauthenticity is astonishing. And if she continues to speak in ways that surely set off even the most hardened liberal’s bull detector, she is not going to be the president of the United States.
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