Plutocrat Or Populist? Actually, Hillary Clinton Is Neither (Joe Conason) [View all]

[Dawgs]

http://www.nationalmemo.com/plutocrat-populist-actually-hillary-clinton-neither/

As America’s biggest political target – a status she is likely to enjoy for the foreseeable future – Hillary Rodham Clinton takes incoming fire of every caliber from all directions. One day her words are ripped from context to depict her as a plutocratic elitist; on another day, she is quoted, selectively, to prove that she is a raving populist. And on still another day last week, when she was campaigning in North Carolina for Senator Kay Hagan, a right-wing rag tarred her as a “plutocratic populist.”

“I’m talking about people who get up and go to work every day, [whose paychecks] haven’t been raised since 1997,” she told a conservative farmers’ group in 2007. “And congressional salaries have gone up more than $30,000 at the same time. I don’t think we should have any more congressional pay raises until, number one, the minimum wage is raised, but number two, until average wages start going up, because the last five years Americans have been treading water.”

Clinton is a sharp, tough, determined politician who rose, like her husband, from an ordinary family. She understands the pressures wreaking havoc on the system of rewards and rules that built this country. Neither plutocrat nor populist, she firmly believes a strong middle class is the essence of a democratic society. But amid the ceaseless clamor of right-wing ideology, that may just be radical enough.

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