Clinton and the Corporations
With some of America's foremost capitalists too shy to defend publicly the system that has enriched them, the job is left to Senator Clinton. Explaining over the weekend why she accepts campaign contributions from lobbyists, she said, according to a report on the Associated Press wire, "They represent nurses, they represent social workers, they represent, yes, they represent corporations that employ a lot of people."
Well, let's hear it for the corporations that employ a lot of people. A cynic would say that Mrs. Clinton came to her appreciation of corporations the old-fashioned way, by getting rich herself, along with her husband, off corporate book advances, director's fees, and his speaking fees. Not to mention a fast commodity trade here or there. But these columns don't begrudge anyone their prosperity, not even our senator and her spouse.
The weird thing is that Mrs. Clinton's defense of capitalism, mild as it was, amounts to an outspokenly centrist view in the Democratic presidential primary. There Mrs. Clinton is running against Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, whose Web site states that "corporations have cut wages and benefits, slashed working hours, tried to undermine wage and hour provisions, reneged on contracts, and jettisoned retirements through bankruptcy strategies."
Another Democrat running for president is the angry former senator from Alaska, Michael Gravel, who claims that "The Clintons and the DLC sold out the Democratic Party to Wall Street." Even the venue for Mrs. Clinton's remarks — a conference organized by the Daily Kos, whose group is so far left-wing that an anti-war ex-officer serving as a moderator actually tried to pull rank on an enlisted member of the military who suggested that America might actually win in Iraq — is a sign of the dominance exerted by the far left on the Democrats.
No doubt Mrs. Clinton's defense of capitalism is one of the reasons she is leading in the polls for the Democratic nomination. There are a lot of unionized public employees in the Democratic primary electorate. It turns out that soaring numbers of them own, through pension funds, huge stakes in American corporations. It's hard to be a majority party or a winning candidate in America without winning over a lot of voters who work for corporations and who realize that they aren't necessarily the enemy. Now, if Mrs. Clinton would just start voting on tax policy in Congress in a way that indicates she means what she says, she really might be getting somewhere.
