Looks to me like Hillary Clinton's campaign is shaping up to

[cascadiance]

62. I'm still waiting for populist SUBSTANCE, rather than a populist LABEL for her campaign...

She should have made statements in her announcement that noted:

1) She doesn't support the TPP, despite her earlier work on it.
2) She doesn't support expansion of H-1B Visa program and other similar guest worker programs because of the costs to American workers and to foreign workers that are forced in to indentured servitude, despite her earlier support for this expansion.
3) She supports cutting back military spending and redirecting that spending back to investing in our own infrastructure where that investment will actually generate long term value rather than building weapons that don't get used, or if they are used just cause more losses for everyone involved other than the arms manufacturers.
4) She supports funding higher level education and providing forgiveness/relief for students who have endured such high student loan costs, whether they've gone broke paying it down, or still have the debt load hanging over them, which prevents them from helping restore our economy if they can spend more money they earn.
5) She supports more investment in alternative fuels and not the carbon-based fuel industries as addressing climate change is absolutely necessary in 2016 and further.

THAT would be her trying to be populist. Just saying in general terms that she wants to "be populist" and "talk to ordinary people" sounds nice, but it still isn't delivering of being someone that's trying to be a populist candidate just yet. A good populist candidate will remind people that substantive policy statements ARE important for them to understand and look at when measuring candidates, so that they can feel comfortable that who they are voting for is working for them and America as a whole, and is not just trying to say "join our team" to beat the other team as if it is a sports recruiter.

And working in a campaign like this IS the way to win over disaffected independents, and perhaps even some Republicans, who have felt left out of the equation like many of the rest of us have felt in terms of having politicians working for them and not for others with more money. If we don't have the message, we'll have that populist message potentially worked against us by someone like a Rand Paul, who though he's a wolf in sheep's clothing, will play the popular Libertarian small element of populist items like legalizing drugs, cutting back on military spending, and cutting back on domestic spying. We will lose and Hillary will also lose, if we don't engage with citizens more in a substantive fashion.

I can just see now how the Third Way will now start labeling their think tanks, etc. with the "populist" label much as they have falsely latched on to the term "progressive" to label other groups they control in an effort to marginalize that term to describe those that don't want corporatist policies.