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- “And so let me begin by walking back that totally awesome thing I said the other day…”
Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus tried his hand at a little sporty shit-talk yesterday, when he told NewsMax that Hillary Clinton is “becoming sort of a caricature.” Priebus continued, “I think she’s trying too hard and she’s not really good at this stuff,” with “this stuff” meaning politics. On the one hand, Priebus trying his hand at a little pre-game intimidation is hilarious—his lack of chin and translucent skin don’t exactly scream King of the Locker Room Head Game. On the other hand, once you plug your ears with your fingers and work past the obvious self-loathing screaming through Priebus’s statement—he probably reads a thousand blog comments a day written by frothing-at-the-mouth Republicans insisting he’s “not really good at this stuff”—he’s got a kernel of a point there.
The moment that Priebus is referencing is a rally for Massachusetts gubernatorial candidate Martha Coakley. The media was drooling over the event, which marked the first time Clinton shared the stage with Senator Elizabeth Warren, who progressives want to run against Clinton in 2016. And Clinton said some powerful stuff at that campaign event. She pointed out that too many women work for minimum wage, and asked the audience “why, after women have contributed so much to our economy, some people still act like it’s 1955. Isn’t it amazing that we’re still debating that women deserve equal pay for equal work?” She even referred to reproductive rights by name, which is unfortunately something you don’t see every day at a political rally.
But here’s where it starts to go south. Clinton also told the audience, “Don’t let anybody tell you that, you know, it’s corporations and businesses that create jobs.” Let me be clear: This is a true statement. Jobs are created in America thanks largely to consumer spending. The idea that the 1 percent and their corporations just create jobs out of whole cloth is a Republican fairy tale. They create jobs in response to healthy spending, which is created by a healthy middle class and an upwardly mobile lower class. But Clinton’s statement was obviously an inelegant rephrasing of Warren’s passionate 2011 argument against the Republican “class war” comments, the same argument that President Obama inelegantly rephrased as “you didn’t build that,” a comment that Republicans then based an entire National Convention on in 2012. Clinton took some guff for this comment on right-wing blogs and from a few cable-news concern trolls, but it really wasn’t much of a big deal.
Then Clinton corrected herself yesterday. “I short-handed this point the other day,” she said by way of apology, “so let me be absolutely clear about what I’ve been saying for a couple decades.” Then she clarified a point that didn’t need clarification: “Our economy grows when businesses and entrepreneurs create good-paying jobs here in an America where workers and families are empowered to build from the bottom up and the middle out, not when we hand out tax breaks for corporations that outsource jobs or stash their profits overseas.” This in itself is an inelegant rephrasing of her original rephrasing.
It’s a subtle shift, but it’s definitely a political maneuver. When Republicans talk about “businesses and entrepreneurs,” they almost never mean the guy opening a sandwich shop on a loan. They’re talking about “entrepreneurs” like the Koch Brothers and “businesses” like Amazon. So by placing the onus of job creation back on “businesses and entrepreneurs,” Clinton is ceding that point back to the Republicans. She’s letting go of one of the most successful arguments that Democrats have—the idea that the economy is built on everyone, not just a wealthy handful of so-called “job creators.” If she wins her party’s nomination, Clinton needs to elegantly explain this idea again and again over the next two years. She needs to be clear and she can’t apologize. This is class war like they’re saying on Fox News, it’s just going in the opposite direction. Republicans are pushing an oligarchy on us—a nation run by the very wealthy, for the very wealthy. Everyone knows this. And if Clinton can’t articulate that fact, and if she can’t promise to do something about it, she’s not going to be able to capture the excitement of liberal voters, and she will retroactively prove the truth behind Priebus’s shit-talk.