By Colin Reed|15 hours ago
Hillary Clinton has a big problem in the Rust Belt and she knows it. Her infamous promise "to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business" was a rare moment of honesty for a politician who struggles mightily with the truth.
Her startling determination to actively remove more jobs from an economy that has already left too many behind continues to haunt her. It enabled Bernie Sanders to trounce her in the West Virginia primary by 15 points - the same state Clinton carried over then-U.S. Sen. Barack Obama by a massive 41-point margin eight years earlier.
That's why the location of Monday's highly-anticipated inaugural joint campaign appearance of Clinton and U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts was puzzling. Billed by the national media as a trial balloon for Warren's vice presidential audition, the event took place in Ohio, another state with a sizable population reliant on the coal industry.
If Clinton is hoping Warren can fix her problems in Appalachia, she's severely misguided. At the height of the 2012 Massachusetts Senate campaign, Warren's work for LTV Steel came under heavy scrutiny from reporters in the Bay State. At issue was Warren's work in the 1990s as a corporate gun, hired by the industrial conglomerate in its fight to avoid paying for the health benefits for retired coal miners.
Warren standing on the side of a big company and against its workers put her at odds with the Clinton administration, as well as the future president of the AFL-CIO, who predicted Warren could cost 200,000 workers their health care.
Coming on the heels of the blockbuster Boston Herald story uncovering the unfair preferential treatment Warren received at Harvard Law School, Warren's LTV steel controversy undercut her image as a warrior for the middle class, and fueled doubts about her character and integrity. The full extent of Warren's work as a highly-compensated mercenary for corporate America is murky, as she refused to make public tax returns that could shed further light on the matter.
Even before the re-emergence of old Warren scandals, there were already warning signs for Clinton's ability to compete in Appalachia. Polling data last week from Quinnipiac University showed Clinton and Donald Trump essentially deadlocked in Ohio and Pennsylvania, two states with a combined 38 electoral votes up for grabs in November. These numbers were virtually unchanged from May.
Furthermore, Clinton still faces the challenge of stitching together the deeply-fractured party she now leads. A recent Bloomberg Politics poll shows that barely half of Sanders supporters plan to vote for Clinton in November. That dismal number is a big reason that Warren is on the stump for Clinton, and even being actively vetted for vice president. Long before anyone outside of Burlington, Vt., knew the name Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren was winning the hearts and minds of the far-left crowd, laying the groundwork for their hijacking of the Democratic Party.
To help fix her problems with the newly-empowered Warren wing, Sanders "was given unprecedented sway over the Democratic Party platform," as the Washington Post put it back in May, being allowed to appoint five members of the 15-person panel. One prominent Sanders backer on the platform writing committee, an environmentalist from Vermont named Bill McKibben, is so radical he supports a policy limiting couples to one child per family to reduce the environmental impact on the planet.
Last weekend, the platform committee attempted to adopt a number of left-wing environmental amendments, including a nationwide ban on fracking and a new national tax on energy.
This is the 2016 Democratic Party, folks. It's not one in touch with the struggles of everyday Americans who feel abandoned in this Obama economy. It's one more focused on pushing fringe environmentalist policies than putting people back to work. Hillary Clinton's pledge to kill even more jobs as she appeases the ruling left wing of her party makes her a perfect fit as its leader, but a disaster for American workers.
Colin Reed was Scott Brown's campaign manager, and is now the executive director of America Rising PAC, a Republican research and communications firm.
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