By Marc Jampole
No wonder Republicans are so afraid of Hillary Clinton that
they continue to hitch their wagon to the exploding death star known as Donald
Trump.
The Clintons made $10 million last year, which definitely
makes them one-percenters, just like all our presidents have been since
Eisenhower, except her husband (who joined later) and Barack Obama (who is well
on his way).
What makes Hillary Clinton so dangerous to the ultra-wealthy
is her willingness to pay her fair share of taxes without engaging in the kind
of complicated, if legal, tax avoidance schemes that we saw in Mitt Romney’s
taxes and which past statements by Trump suggest are in his. The Clintons
fulfilled their civic responsibility by paying their fair share of taxes, an
idea that our plutocracy thinks is un-American and socialist.
The cynical will say that the Clintons avoided sophisticated
tax avoidance schemes because they knew Hillary would be running for president
and wanted to present clean books. But even if their tax strategies derived
completely from political calculations, we must then contrast what Hillary thinks
will fly with the American public with what Romney (and no doubt Trump) does.
Romney was not afraid that taking legal deductions would make him look bad,
even though it reduced his tax rate to 14%, lower than his secretary. In older
tax returns from the 1970s, Trump paid no taxes because of the lush tax breaks
afforded to real estate investment. By contrast, the “cynical” version of the
Clintons decided that the American public really did want their leaders to pay
their fair share—which in the case of the Clintons is almost 35% of their
income.
Of course, perhaps the Clintons realized that they operate
under two double standards—one for the Clintons and one for Hillary for being a
woman—and understood that the mainstream news media and the GOP would hit them
hard for standard tax shelters used by many one- and two-percenters.
The application of a double standard is implicated in
virtually all of the complaints against Hillary Clinton. She, but no one else,
remains unforgiven for her vote to support the potential invasion of Iraq, as
if she were the only one who could see through the Bush-Cheney lies and
deceptions and so is the only one blamed for falling victim to them. For some
reason, Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden and everyone else who voted for the harsh and
racially based prison terms in the 1990s get free passes, but Hillary who was
not yet in the Senate, gets chided as the wife of the president who reluctantly
signed these bad and now widely regretted pieces of legislation.
Why have there been no investigations of the other
Secretaries of State like Condoleezza Rice who used private servers, except for
the existence of a double standard?
Why has more money been spent on investigating the Benghazi
tragedy than on investigating the Bush Administration for creating a worldwide
torture gulag or instigating the Iraq War, except for the existence of a double
standard?
The email scandal is perhaps the most egregious example of
the double standard applied to Hillary Clinton. People who are making a big
deal about possible conflicts of interest between the Clinton Foundation and
the State Department when Hillary was running it have floated only one example
of a potential conflict problem: a Clinton Foundation donor asked Foundation
employees to hook him up with someone from the State Department. But as it
turned out, the guy didn’t want any favors, business or special treatment. He
wanted to give the State Department inside information he had about a crucial
election in another country. He was not trying to use the Clinton connection
for selfish ends, but to help the United States.
It’s interesting to note that just days after the Clintons
released their latest tax returns, Maureen Dowd ran another
screed in her decades-old campaign against the Clintons. Dowd spends
an entire column trying to present Clinton as the perfect Republican candidate.
She starts her latest flight of fancy by pointing out that the Clintons are
one-percenters, ignoring that they have committed the cardinal sin for the
ultra-wealthy, which is to leave money on the table for others. She creates
Hillary the Republican from bits of facts and innuendos, starting with the
wholly irrelevant fact that she supported Goldwater as a middle-schooler.
Another double standard—others are allowed to change their views, but not Hillary.
Not even the teenaged Hillary.
Most of the evidence that Hillary is really a Republican
amounts to a whispering campaign. Dowd assumes that her “pals” John McCain and
Lindsay Graham are rooting for her and that the endorsements from the
Republican defense establishment has to do with her politics and not the fact
that her opponent is an ignorant looney who lacks self-control. Dowd is also
convinced that until recently, Hillary never stirred up any emotion among women
and that the recent excitement about Hillary is limited to Republican women in
the suburbs. (Dowd obviously has avoided Facebook and Twitter for the past two
years, or else she would have seen the electrifyingly high level of excitement
that Hillary has generated among women since she announced she was running for
president.)
Nowhere does Dowd mention that Clinton explicitly states
that she wants to raise taxes on the wealthy to pay for massive investment in
infrastructure and alternative energy technologies. Nowhere does Dowd mention
that Hillary explicitly states that she wants to raise the minimum wage to $15
(although I suspect that if Dowd had brought up the minimum wage, she would
have used it to call Hillary a flip-flopper, since before the primaries she
wanted to start with $10.10 an hour). Nowhere do we read of Hillary’s many
connections to labor unions and organizations working to improve the economic
standing of minorities. Dowd also seems to forget that Clinton, unlike most
Republicans, believes in a woman’s right to birth control and abortion and the
right of all Americans to marry whomever they damn well please. Most
Republicans want to build a wall along our border with Mexico. Most have a much
more bellicose attitude about the Middle East than Hillary,
despite what Dowd says. Most are against the Iran nuclear deal. Most want to lower
taxes on the wealthy. So how is Hillary the ideal Republican candidate?
The Dowd column is a perfect hatchet job on Hillary’s
liberal bona fides. Few facts, a lot of assumptions and a ridiculous
conclusion.
The truth is quite the opposite from Dowd’s absurd
assertion: Hillary Clinton stands in the great center-looking left tradition of
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey. She is embracing
what is perhaps the most left-wing platform for any political party in American
history. Her plans are detailed and
realistic. To call her the ideal GOP nominee is a slander that would not be
legal if Donald Trump had his way.
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