2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumWaPo Editorial: Hillary Clinton offers a welcome concession to reality
VIEWED IN the abstract, or compared with a Platonic ideal of political speechmaking, Hillary Clintons economic-policy address Wednesday rated as well short of historic. There was little new in the list of proposals she laid out. On one or two points, she was objectionable as when she pledged to say no to the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, which she rightly supported when she was secretary of state.
Viewed in its real-world context, however, Ms. Clintons speech was considerably better, and more reassuring, than that. These are troubled times in the United States economically, and also and perhaps more important, politically. The Republican Party is about to nominate an uncivil demagogue for president, a man who offers insults of his opponents in lieu of constructive realistic economic plans. The Democrats, meanwhile, face an internal left-wing revolt spearheaded by a candidate who was more decent personally than the GOP standard-bearer-to-be but whose policy offerings are, in their own way, deeply irresponsible.
In the middle of all this, Ms. Clinton stood before her audience Wednesday and insisted that it takes a plan. And it takes experience and the ability to work with both parties to get results. Whats more, Ms. Clinton refused to paint the still-recovering U.S. economy in dire terms, which is of course in her self-interest because her party is in the White House and also that assessment has the advantage of being true, despite what Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have been saying. Beyond her capitulation on the TPP, there was blessedly little evidence that she feels forced to adopt the more expansive and expensive plans of the partys left wing, such as free state college for all or universal zero-co-pay health insurance.
Her plans for keeping the economy on an even keel were incremental but appropriately focused on the needs of working- and middle-class people promises, essentially, to sustain the progress of the Obama administration and pick up its unfinished business: promoting higher-wage employment through major new infrastructure spending; helping families cope with workplace realities through paid family leave; chipping away at the student-debt burden; enforcing existing Dodd-Frank regulations on Wall Street vigorously ; and extending rules to cover the shadow banking system. Though there wasnt much detail attached, Ms. Clinton also repeated her pledges to encourage longer-range thinking by corporations and to reward them for profit-sharing with employees.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/hillary-clinton-offers-a-welcome-concession-to-reality/2016/06/22/9cf03160-38b1-11e6-8f7c-d4c723a2becb_story.html