Please welcome to the presidential race the latest version of the Democratic front-runner: Ms. Hillary Rodham Obama!
The speech Hillary delivered Saturday on Roosevelt Island made clear her presidency would be Barack Obama’s third term. The policies she would advance as president are intended to deepen Obama’s unprecedented enmeshment of the economy and the government.
Ms. Rodham Obama went through an exhaustive list of goodies her presidency would deliver to Americans. And when I say “exhaustive,” I mean exhaustive. The speech ran longer than 40 minutes, and despite the fact that she had been preparing to give it for weeks, Hillary also made it clear her rhetoric and her delivery are just not going to get much better. Ever.
Nothing she mentioned would be unfamiliar to anyone who has listened to an Obama State of the Union address every January. It’s the 21st Century Left Liberal Laundry List, down to the war she announced against “powerful forces” in hedge funds and on Wall Street who have brought “secret, unaccountable money” into the system — this from a woman who raised hundreds of millions from Wall Street and hedge-fund giants in 2008 and whose family foundation has become the poster child for secret and unaccountable money in American politics.
Hillary pointed out that no one could ever call her a quitter. No one ever has called her that, which is more than I can say for “chutzpahdik,” the Yiddish word that perfectly describes what she did Saturday by calling for the removal of big money from politics.
The speech mattered, though, because of what she said she would do — and almost all of it involves placing new burdens on businesses and taxpayers alike.
Some cost nothing for the government to impose, but it’s the private sector that will struggle — like those companies that will be ordered to provide paid leave, for example.
Some will cost government far too much ever to be realized, like providing “preschool and quality child care to every child in America.” But those sweeping, expensive programs will always be there to tempt and taunt liberals with their glory and wonder and the dream that maybe by the next election the miracle will happen.
In that sense, Ms. Rodham Obama is indeed the candidate of the future, as she so desperately sought to cast herself Saturday — a future in which government takes stage center not only in the management of public affairs but of private economic and social relationships, as well.
A few years ago, I would have told you that such a government-centered vision is so outside the American experience it would be suicide for a national politician to enunciate it. The re-election of Barack Obama shook my confidence in this view, and it may be that the election of 2016 will be the real test of whether America has indeed evolved into a country guided less by an ethic of self-sufficiency and more by a desire for top-down solutions and cradle-to-grave safety.
And yet for a candidate of the future, Hillary was certainly focused on the past in comic fashion. She began by invoking a speech delivered almost 74 years ago (FDR’s “Four Freedoms”) and taunted Republicans by citing lyrics from a song recorded 51 years ago (Paul McCartney’s “Yesterday”). She concluded by mentioning the passage of the constitutional amendment guaranteeing women’s suffrage in 1919.
Republicans have spent the past few years trying to teach themselves to stop invoking Ronald Reagan wherever they go because Reagan was elected to the presidency 35 years ago and half of today’s voters were children or hadn’t even been born when he served.
For Hillary on Saturday, mentioning 1980 would have seemed positively hip. Maybe when she announces her candidacy for the third time later this year, after this second announcement turns out to have fallen flat, she’ll update her references a little.
