It’s Halloween, which is an appropriate day to talk about one of the deepest human responses: fear.
A week ago, presumed Democrat presidential nominee Hillary Clinton was speaking at a Martha Coakley campaign rally in Massachusetts. Clinton uttered what has to be among the dumbest lines of the year, when she said, “Don’t let anybody tell you, you know, it’s corporations and businesses that create jobs.”
The networks ignored that remark. PolitiFact did its best to fix them for her. Clinton herself tried to clean them up Monday.
Clinton aides claim that Hillary meant to insert “tax breaks for” ahead of “corporations.” That helps, but not a whole lot. Tax breaks do help create jobs. That’s why New York has gone on a national campaign advertising tax breaks for businesses that start up there or move there. Gov. Rick Perry travels all over the country and Texas has poached jobs from several states by offering tax breaks to businesses that re-locate to the Lone Star State. When businesses keep more of their own money out of government’s greedy clutches, they are free to spend those dollars to expand, and that may include hiring more people.
Hillary’s gaffe, if that’s what it was, was made with a fear factor weighing on her mind. She was speaking at a rally in Massachusetts. That state is home to one of the most vocal anti-business Democrats in the nation, Sen. Elizabeth Warren. In the age before YouTube, a Democrat could speak to a far-left audience without much fear that their remarks would go national.
During her run for the Senate, Warren ran an anti-business platform. Catering to the far-left Democrat base, and articulating what she really thinks, Warren said: “There is nobody in this country who got rich on their own. Nobody.
“You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory — and hire someone to protect against this — because of the work the rest of us did.
“Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless — keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”
That demeaning, pat-on-the-head attitude — it ignores the risks that entrepreneurs take, and the many companies that actually do build their own roads and even the infrastructure and economies that support their products — turned up again the following year, when President Barack Obama assailed business in his famous “You didn’t build that!” speech.
Both Warren’s and Obama’s comments resonate with the Democrats’ anti-business base. Warren won, Obama rallied his base and was re-elected, and the Democrat base still adores both of them even while Obama’s popularity has plummeted nationally. Warren is being pushed by the left to run for president.
And there’s Hillary Clinton last Friday. Sen. Warren is in the audience. It’s a rally for Coakley, the Democrat who stands to blow a second campaign in a deep blue state.
Hillary takes the stage, but she has the past more on her mind than the present or the approaching mid-term elections. She isn’t really there to help Coakley. Hillary Clinton is there to help herself.
In 2006 and 2007, Hillary Clinton was seen as inevitable. She would be the next president. The actual campaign and votes were mere formalities.
Clinton never saw Barack Obama coming. Early on, even Barack Obama never saw Barack Obama coming. He even dismissed his own chances, and said that he ought to “do something” in the Senate before thinking about running for president. Like Obama then, Warren now is downplaying any chance that she will run for president. But the sirens of the far left are calling to her to challenge Clinton, whom they see as too deep in the 1990s scandals then and too cozy with Wall Street now.
When Obama ran, he ran from Hillary’s left on the war and on economics while he cast himself as a less divisive figure than Sen. Clinton. Hillary never had an answer for him. She questioned his experience in that “3 AM” ad. She deployed her husband. She tried crying to soften her icy image.
It didn’t work, of course. Obama drowned Hillary’s campaign with gauzy rhetoric, a great logo, a smile and a whole lot of promises he never intended to keep. The inevitable had to settle for secretary of State, while the far-left inexperienced community organizer won the nomination and the presidency. The ultimate prize, the goal of her life, slipped right through Hillary Clinton’s fingers. Now she has Benghazi on her record as part of a broad record of failure in the Obama administration.
Six years later, Hillary Clinton is once again the “inevitable” candidate. And there stands yet another inexperienced, academic, far-left senator who energizes the Democrat base and threatens to derail her dreams.
Last Friday’s anti-business line was not a gaffe at all. Hillary Clinton meant every word of it.
Hillary Clinton is terrified that Sen. Elizabeth Warren is nothing more or less than Sen. Barack Obama 2.0. Warren’s mere existence must be causing Hillary to wake up alone in a cold sweat, trembling, that once again her dreams of power and glory, the purpose to which she has dedicated her entire life, will be killed by an undeserving upstart.
“That’s mine!” she must say to herself at the thought of Warren taking it all away from her. “And I will say and do anything to get it and keep it!”
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