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The sound of the spin machines are so loud I can hear them here in my hotel room in Toronto. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made a political error — a big one. And like the toothpaste that can’t be put in to the tube, she gave her Republican and Democratic foes a line they can run in ads and repeat, no matter how many times she and her supporters try to soft-pedal it or walk it back. The You Tube with this statement is already getting big hits:
Don’t let anybody, don’t let anybody tell you that, ah, you know, it’s corporations and businesses that create jobs. You know that old theory, trickle-down economics. That has been tried, that has failed. It has failed rather spectacularly.
It’s an instant line that will be repeated over and over on Fox News no matter how much she clarifies, or even if it’s proven that a ventriloquist said it for her (don’t blame me, I was on tour in New York last week and was nowhere where she is). And now the backpedaling has begun:
When Hillary Clinton fumbled a line at a rally last Friday — “Don’t let anybody tell you that corporations and businesses create jobs” — the comment caused a minor outrage among political observers. Republicans said she’d been pandering to liberals. Democrats wondered if she’d been trying too hard to channel Elizabeth Warren, the populist senator who also spoke at the event.
On Monday, Clinton went out of her way to correct the comment at a rally for Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, the Democrat up for reelection in this Hudson Valley district.
Clinton said in her speech that corporations that outsource jobs or move profits overseas should not be granted tax breaks. The clarification made clear that the remark was a botched line — not new messaging from Clinton, who has honed a new stump speech during a series of rallies ahead the election next month.
“The Republican alternative is a discredited economic theory that will hurt middle class families,” Clinton said. “So-called trickle-down economics has failed.”
“I short-handed this point the other day, so let me be absolutely clear about what I’ve been saying for a couple of decades.”
“Our economy grows when businesses and entrepreneurs create good-paying jobs here in America and 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.”A Clinton aide pointed to the remarks at the Maloney event as clarification to she had meant to say in her speech last week.
Fair enough, but you can’t discount the fact that this line will have legs until she is either defeated if she runs for the nomination or President or is elected and sworn in. Our politics works this way: repeat a line that indeed reflects what’s in a politician’s soul, or a line that represents a dumb mistake. Repeat it over and over and over (and over). Jonathan Chait nails how the 21st century’s follow-the-leader media cover a statement such as this:
Last week, the American political system performed a test run of its gaffe system. You will be relieved to learn that all the pieces are functioning soundly. It began Friday afternoon, when Hillary Clinton, appearing at a rally for Massachusetts governor candidate Martha Coakley, told her audience, “Don’t let anybody tell you that it’s corporations and businesses that create jobs.”
The context of her remarks, in which she proceeded to denounce the Republican plan to reduce taxes and regulations for business, made it fairly clear that Clinton actually meant to disagree with the idea that its policies designed to benefit corporation and businesses that create jobs, not that jobs are actually formed mostly by private businesses.
Nonetheless, it was good enough to crank up the gaffe machine. Conservatives used the gaffe as a hook for unhinged paranoid claims that Clinton has revealed her secret hate for capitalism. (Forbes argues that Clinton has exposed herself as one of “certain deeply committed progressives do not support large-scale private free enterprise and do want the government to manage, control and oversee sector after sector of the economy.”) Likewise, the mainstream media dutifully conveyed the controversy. (Bloomberg reported that Clinton has “flip-flopped on whether companies create jobs,” citing three passages in her recent book that assume companies and businesses can create jobs. Almost as Clinton somehow … believes that companies create jobs.)
Finally, Clinton herself defensively explained that she did not actually mean it.
On the other hand, if Hillary Clinton is as stellar a politician as she is hyped to be, she and her crew should have been aware they were giving their foes in both parties an early Christmas gift. You have to conclude there is some truth in what Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said as he clearly couldn’t resist commenting on Hillary Clinton, a candidate who GOPers (despite what he says below) would rather not run against and fear:
“She’s trying to be [Sen.] Elizabeth Warren [D-Mass.],” Priebus said. “It’s pretty obvious, and she’s trying really hard. I don’t know if she was a little off-script on that particular moment but it clearly wasn’t natural and it was certainly awkward.”
He pointed to other gaffes from Clinton in the past few months, such as saying she was “dead broke” when she left the White House.
“You look at her book rollout — it was a disaster. She talks off the cuff; it doesn’t work. She makes one mistake after the next,” he said.
“Put yourself in my shoes,” he added. “And your job was you need to raise a lot of money, you need to recruit a lot of volunteers, and you need to unify the Republican Party, and you know that there’s a lot of opinion within our party. Those are your jobs, you’d want nothing more than Hillary Clinton to be the nominee of the Democrat Party.”
With the stumbles added to that opposition from Republicans, Priebus said in summation: “There’d be no one you would want more to run against than Hillary Clinton, and on top of it, she’s not really good at politics.”
That’s true, she never won an election.
Oh, wait: she did — and by big margins when she ran for Senator of New York: 55% of the vote in 2000 and 67% in 2006.
Well, those (and the primaries she won in 2008) MUST have been outliers — and I’m sure Rush and Sean will agree..
graphic via shutterstock.com
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.