Hillary Does What Democrats Should Do: Make Like FDR
Earl Ofari Hutchinson
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/earl-ofari-hutchinson/hillary-does-what-democrats-should-do-make-like-fdr_b_11513460.html
Hillary Clinton is doing what Democrats should have been doing all along, and that’s looking and sounding — and, if given the chance, acting — like FDR. This means going big, big, big and fully using government to radically ramp up new programs and initiatives to tackle everything from the nation’s crumbling infrastructure to the chronic unemployment, especially among the urban poor.
Her FDR-like chorus was in full effect in her speech at a Michigan auto and aircraft parts manufacturing plant near Detroit. She promised a big spending spree to the tune of nearly $300 billion on a vast array of infrastructure building and repair projects; roads, bridges, airports schools, sewer systems and so on. The projects would create new jobs for thousands.
Clinton made it clear that she expects the rich to foot much of the bill by demanding hefty tax hikes on them. She added the final FDR touch to her big spending plan by promising to plop the legislation on Congress’ table within her first 100 days in office.
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Clinton is doing the same. However, she also will have to fight the one thing that has kept Democrats since LBJ from making the fight against poverty, wealth and income inequality, and making the rich and corporations pay their fair share of taxes a party staple. That is the deep fear of being perennially branded, baited and reviled with the label and the perception that Democrats reflexively do tax and spend — that is spend at the expense of the middle class for programs that aid the poor and minorities. Democrats did lose elections in the 1980s to Reagan and Bush, and always the losses came with the tag that the Democrats were fixated on tilting to minorities. The race-tinged appeals did shell-shock the party. Bill Clinton was unabashed in basing his 1992 presidential campaign on courting the white middle class, and erasing the GOP-imposed stigma of the Democrats as solely the party of and for minorities. It worked. Clinton won and won again in 1996. This even more firmly implanted the notion and the fear that Democrats must run from big spending on jobs and infrastructure as being synonymous with pandering to minorities...... That’s a history that Clinton is largely rejecting. And well she should. FDR did and the country was the big winner for it.
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