DAILY KOS: Writing in Politico journalists Ben White and Maggie Haberman reported on political conversations with two dozen unaligned GOP donors, Wall Street executives, and corporate lobbyists. When asked about the 2016 presidential election, these Post Modern voters viewed potential Republican Candidate Jeb Bush and Secretary Clinton as interchangeable and observed:
The darkest secret in the big money world of the Republican coastal elite is that the most palatable alternative to a nominee such as Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas or Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky would be Clinton, a familiar face on Wall Street following her tenure as a New York senator with relatively moderate views on taxation and financial regulation. “If it turns out to be Jeb versus Hillary we would love that and either outcome would be fine,” one top Republican-leaning Wall Street lawyer said over lunch in midtown Manhattan last week. “We could live with either one. Jeb versus Joe Biden would also be fine. It’s Rand Paul or Ted Cruz versus someone like Elizabeth Warren that would be everybody’s worst nightmare.” MORE
HUFFINGTON POST: Recently, University of California Economics Professor Robert Reich identified six principles of the new populism:
1. Cut the biggest Wall Street banks down to a size where they’re no longer too big to fail.
2. Resurrect the Glass-Steagall Act, the law separating investment from commercial banking thereby preventing companies from gambling with their depositors’ money.
3. End corporate welfare including subsidies to big oil, agribusiness, pharmaceuticals, and Wall Street.
4. Stop the National Security Agency from spying on Americans.
5. Scale back American interventions overseas.
6. Oppose trade agreements crafted by big corporations.
Secretary Clinton opposes these principles, while Senator Warren supports them. MORE
NEIL SAPERSTEIN: In December 2007, just as the 2008 presidential primaries were beginning to heat up, and with Hillary Clinton 26 points ahead in national polling of Democrats, I wrote an article for AlterNet arguing that she was beatable, that she had vulnerabilities the other candidates did not have, that she had historically high “unfavorables,” that she polled poorly against Republicans and that Democrats should rethink the “inevitability” of her candidacy. Apparently, they did and we know how that turned out. Once again, Clinton is riding high in polling of Democrats; once again, her supporters are claiming she is “inevitable;” and once again, she has vulnerabilities other candidates lack, including extremely high “unfavorables,” as well as additional liabilities in 2016 she didn’t have in 2008 — some of her own making, some not. MORE