Hillary Clinton is in a bit of a box because the Democratic party is shifting to the left, there’s no doubt about it, and she’s playing a little bit of catch up. Sanders is maybe closer to where the heart of the Democratic party is right now. This Wall Street frustration has been building since before the Occupy movement, but of course Occupy is the core of the Sander’s campaign....
It’s interesting to watch the restraint Clinton has to show in wanting to on one hand say, I’m going be just as tough on Wall Street as Sanders is... But when he says things like the entire idea of Wall Street is based on a fraud... Notice she didn’t push back on that during the debate.
I had to ask her about it on “Meet the Press” on Sunday, but she didn’t want to push back because she didn’t want to look like she was defending Wall Street. Like that’s the box she’s in. She wants to be a critic of Wall Street, but a responsible critic...
This is a challenge for her and she’s just has to find find a different angle. She’s not going win the who’s tougher, who’s more anti-Wall Street fight. So Clinton has to find other things. I think that’s why she tried foreign policy. The problem for her is that right now, particularly in New Hampshire, foreign policy and national security is what about 9 percent of voters care about it.
The Republican primary is a different story. It’s a top issue among Republicans. It’s not a top issue among the Democrats here. Maybe down the road it will become one when there’s a different focus on Sander’s as an actual potential nominee.
On the issue of women supporting Hillary Clinton, let me defend Madeleine Albright and Gloria Steinem and the sentiment behind their comments... or my mom will chew me. Let’s remember, my mom has worked her whole life and my mother didn’t get promotions because she was a woman. We forget that generation, and I think that’s what Gloria Steinem and Madeleine Albright are trying to say.
For a younger generation, they don’t realize it wasn’t that long ago that men could get away with patting women on the bottom and it was just a joke or you didn’t get promotions because you were a woman. Or then when there was only one seat for a woman, all of a sudden, and that’s what my mom’s always saying, women would beat up other women essentially, rhetorically in order to get that seat. It wasn’t a good time to be a woman in the workplace and so that’s the frustration of this older generation.
I get where this sentiment is coming from. It doesn’t wear well, I think, in public and it’s certainly the younger generation of women, who have grown up in a much more egalitarian society, are thinking what’s this about? And they’re not thinking in terms of full objectivity. But I think this has been a problem for the Clinton campaign for a long time.
