
The next time you run into Hillary Clinton, ask her how she feels about President Obama’s tax proposals in his State of the Union speech. Does she, too, want to raise the capital gains tax to 28%? Obama’s radical economic proposals are putting Hillary in a bind. Does she follow his lead and alienate her Wall Street bankrollers? Or does she alienate her rich pals and follow Obama’s and Elizabeth Warren?
Obama’s suddenly aggressive leftist policies are creating a problem for Hillary’s presidential plans. She is eventually going to have to take a position on them. Does she like the bill to raise the definition of full- time work under Obamacare to 40 hours?Or the Keystone Pipeline? Or a cut-off of aid to the Palestinians if they go after Israel in the International Criminal Court? Or new sanctions on Iran? or, for that matter, his amnesty for illegal immigrants?
The uncommon burst of post-election activity (i.e. leftist liberation) that has come over Obama since he presided over the annihilation of a quarter of the Senate’s Democrats, is putting Hillary in a tough spot. Unless she opts out pretty quickly and pretty often, she will find that her 2016 platform has been written for her…and that its way too far to the left to run on.
Obama is obviously going to spend whatever time he devotes to the presidency in the remaining two years to selling his new radical leftwing agenda to America. He won’t succeed, but he will certainly be able to sell it to the left. Liberals will be agog with his class warfare and his damn-Congress-full speed-ahead-attitude. Finally, they are getting the kind of presidential leadership they have pined for since he was elected.
He is not just making proposals. No, President Obama is staking out a left wing agenda that will play in our politics for decades hence. With the exception of Obamacare, the liberal wish list has scarcely been updated since the days of Johnson or even Truman. Now, Obama is carrying income redistribution to a whole new level, articulating a vision that will set liberal hearts aflutter for years hence.
That poses an especially big problem for Hillary. If she embraces this agenda, she types herself as way too far left of center. But if she rejects it, she will turn off liberals and encourage them to sit it out in 2016.
Hillary, for her part, seems to have taken a Trappist vow of silence and remains holed up and inaccessible in order to avoid saying much of anything. That formula would serve her well if her president could keep his mouth shut. But with Obama is constantly making new proposals and his regulatory agencies are running amok with new regulations, Hillary’s silence can and will be read as assent, trapping her in an ultra left agenda of which the vast bulk of the voters strongly disapprove.
Hillary’s nineteenth century style front porch campaign, where she rarely ventures forth to answer questions, is also leaving her out of the action. She looks irrelevant and, as Obama stirs passions with his regulations and proposals, she seems to lack conviction by her silence.
She’s taken the bait just a bit. After the President’s State of the Union speech, she tweeted a positive message. But her Wall Street pals and bankrollers won’t appreciate her new populism.And they’re paying the bills.
It’s hard to talk about taxing rich people when she’s being paid over $200,000 a speech by big banks and Wall Street. So the question is does she really mean whagt she says?
But President Obama’s activist agenda is not making Hillary’s life any easier.