Search for "go further" and "Hillary Clinton" for recent news on the Democratic Party's frontrunner, and you won't find any establishment press coverage.
This is disappointing but not unexpected. The establishment press continues to run interference for her, and reporting that Mrs. Clinton will "go further" (to the left, of course) on a number of issues than Barack Obama has while he has been President would not help her in the general election. But it seems to have helped build a bit of distance between herself and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders with Democratic Party primary voters. Sanders has given her far more trouble than anyone expected when he entered the race last year, and who has clearly gotten under Team Clinton's skin. If a Republican or conservative presidential candidate said that he or she would "go further" on hot-button issues, the press would spend days reporting on how "radical" he or she had become.
Here is what Mrs. Clinton said yesterday when asked at an MSNBC-sponsored town hall in Pennsylvania how her governance would be different from Obama's:
Transcript (bold and numbered tags are mine):
QUESTION: Secretary Clinton, we've heard some ways in which we might expect a Clinton presidency to be similar to President Obama's, but What are some points of differentiation we might expect?
HILLARY CLINTON: Great question. I think - I agree with a lot of what President Obama has done and I don’t think he gets the credit he deserves for all that’s accomplished and in particular saving our economy from what could have been a great depression. [1] People I think now don’t really remember how bad off we were.
So I do want to build, but, there are things that I want to go further on. [2] I want to really make a big, big push on equal pay for women. [3] This has to finally be accomplished and I believe that if we start early and we are absolutely determined, we can make a big change there.
I want to make a big push for early childhood education, [4] because we can talk all we want about our schools, but if children come not prepared or able to learn, we’re never going to close the achievement gap.
I will make a big push for affordable college, debt-free tuition and to pay down student debt by allowing students to refinance their debt and, I want to get the government out of the business of making money off of lending money to students. I just disagree with that. [5]
- and I will build on the Affordable Care Act, but I want to tackle the prescription drug costs and make sure that Medicare gets the authority to negotiate for lower drug costs and those costs are then spread throughout our health care system, and I will make a very big push on mental health and addiction. We are not doing enough in either area and we’re paying a very big price and then - [6]
- finally let me just quickly say when it comes to criminal justice reform, I want to build on some of the recommendations that President Obama’s policing commission has made, because I think that we’ve got to do more to retrain our police forces. [7] We have to get best practices from those departments that have good records. We have to make sure that we deal with the — what is called the school to prison pipeline and turn it into a cradle to college pipeline and also go right after incarceration.
And then I really support everything President Obama said he would do through regulation on guns, but we’re going to start the very first day and tackle the gun lobby to try to reduce the outrageous number of people who are dying from gun violence in our country, [8] and I will take that on.
Notes:
[1] — Yours truly nuked that nonsense yesterday in response to President Obama's comment that he should be credited for "saving the world" — not just the U.S., but the whole wide world — "from a great depression."
[2] — With one exception (Item [5], quite ironically), every idea Mrs. Clinton identified would "go further" to the left than President Obama has.
[3] — Equal pay for equal work is the law of the land, and differences between men's and women's earnings are, with the rarest of exceptions, due to occupational and life choices and not discrimination. The only way the left can force the type of "equality" they want to achieve would be to massively and nightmarishly intervene in employment decisions which are currently driven by supply, demand, and merit, down to the micro level with every business and every employer in the nation.
[4] — Study after study has shown that any positive effects gained from Head Start, the war on poverty's premier early childhood education program, disappeared shortly after the enrollment periods ended. How will Mrs. Clinton change that result? The answer, more than likely, is that she doesn't really care about whether that result changes. Instead, she wants to ensure that children begin their program of government indoctrination at the earliest possible time.
[5] — This is rich. The government completely took over disbursing and administering student loans in 2009 after Obama took office. The idea was that supposedly greedy banks would no longer be able to prey on borrowers. Now it's the mean old government that is "making money off of lending money to students." Unless she wants to make all loans interest-free, someone is going to collect interest on student-loan debt. Who remains out there if the government shouldn't do it, and the private sector shouldn't do it?
[6] — Costs in these areas are difficult to control, and the incentives for providers to milk the system by extending treatment periods would be finnancially ruinous.
[7] — No group of people is perfect, but to claim it's police forces which need retraining is nonsense. The problem which is being seen throughout the land is that the "Ferguson effect" is causing police to cut bank on the kinds of activities which have been shown to prevent crime. Naturally, crime has skyrocketed — and it's not the cops' fault.
[8] — Hillary Clinton's hostility toward the right to keep and bear arms will likely make Barack Obama look relatively benign.
Searches at the Associated Press and the New York Times on the four search words listed in this post's first paragraph (not in quotes) for items relating to Mrs. Clinton's "go further" answers returned nothing relevant. But the Times search results had an April 18 item indicating that Mrs. Clinton wants to "go further" than Obama has on immigration — as if we needed something worse in this area than he has already inflicted on us.
A Google News search on those four words with quote marks (sorted by date) returned four relevant items — none of them establishment press outlets.
Mrs. Clinton won't be celebrated for "going further" unless and until she is in the Oval Office. At that point, hosannahs will rain down.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
