Clinton has to be an agent of change
But her presidential campaign hasn’t focused on a fight to help the middle and working classes
Hillary Clinton is the progressive candidate for the U.S. presidency. That is powerfully evident from her platform. Yet on the campaign trail, Clinton has struck such a safe, centralist tone on economic policy that she could be mistaken as a candidate for caretaker of the U.S. rather than a reform-oriented agent of change. Which, in fact, she likely would be. Given her front-runner status, Clinton seems intent on waiting for her opponent to self-destruct. But Donald Trump continues to enjoy substantial support, and in the meantime, Clinton gives the impression of expecting victory to fall in her lap. That’s almost always a formula for defeat.
Clinton is a pro-immigration free trader. But Candidate Clinton feels obliged to take a hard line on both issues. Never mind that economists believe that the immigration reform Clinton’s platform calls for, and a trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) she would likely approve as president, would each yield significant growth in productivity.
That cannot come too soon. America’s productivity growth rate, the chief means by which a country increases its standard of living, has been dropping for years.
Candidate Clinton has declared herself four-square against the TPP. Yet as recently as an Aug. 11 rally in Michigan, Clinton said: “The answer is not to rant and rave — or cut ourselves off from the world,” in obvious reference to the near-violent anti-trade rhetoric of GOP rival Donald Trump. “That would end up killing even more jobs. The answer is to finally make trade work for us, not against us.”
The TPP is a megatrade deal among 12 member nations accounting for about 40 per cent of global GDP. In the early stages of U.S. participation in the TPP negotiations, the effort was spearheaded by then U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She emerged from the talks declaring the deal to be “the gold standard” of trade pacts.
“Maybe she’ll try to renegotiate that deal to fix some of the things she thinks are not perfect about it,” Meg Whitman, CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise and a former GOP candidate for governor of California, told Fortune recently. “(But) I don’t think she’s fundamentally against free trade.”
The most promising cure for an anemic U.S. recovery (matched by slow growth in fellow TPP negotiators Canada and Australia) is a TPP that grants unprecedented access for U.S. and Canadian makers of high-value goods to the huge Pacific Rim market of Japan, Australasia, Malaysia and Vietnam, as well as Chile and Colombia on this side of the Pacific.
You don’t have to read between the lines of the Michigan speech by Candidate Clinton to surmise that a President Clinton, taking Obama’s place at the TPP negotiating table, would strive to win the further concessions she seeks in a TPP deal that is already unprecedented in the comprehensiveness of its labour, environmental and intellectual-property protections.
She would then declare victory and endorse a TPP billed as a deal of President Clinton’s devising.
Why Clinton’s abrupt antipathy for the TPP? During the primaries season, Candidate Clinton was losing the youth vote to a fiercely anti-free-trade message by Bernie Sanders, the U.S. socialist senator from Vermont.
Meanwhile, Trump has railed on about America’s deficits and national debt, often confusing the two.
But like Justin Trudeau’s Liberals, Clinton senses that voters are less concerned about deficits than crumbling infrastructure, both social and physical. Yet Clinton hasn’t made a persuasive case for needed investment in America’s physical and social infrastructure, for fear of coming off as another “tax and spend Democrat.”
Carefully costing her promises, Clinton has matched every new spending program with spending cuts and new revenue sources.
The U.S. is overdue for a big investment in social infrastructure.
The UN measures sustainable development in 124 countries. It uses 33 factors, including education, income inequality, health indicators, industrial innovation, suicide rates, poverty and road accidents.
The U.S. ranks 28th on that list, between Japan and Estonia. Canada ranks 9th, lagging a three-way tie for first among Singapore, Iceland and Sweden.
Clinton’s belief that now is not the time to balance the books wins plaudits from experts like Paul Volcker, the most effective governor in the history of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board, and Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel laureate economist and former chief economist at the World Bank.
The U.S.-based Council on Foreign Relations says the quality of U.S. infrastructure has dropped from fifth in the world in 2002 to 16th in 2015. Clinton’s platform commits $275 billion over five years to investments in physical infrastructure, and another $25 billion to create an “infrastructure bank” providing loans and loan guarantees to pri- vate-sector builders.
The Clinton investments in social infrastructure include increased tuition assistance for middle- and working-class families, $300 million for paid family leave and $200 million for pre-kindergarten programs. Clinton also seeks to boost Social Security payouts and raise the minimum wage.
Clinton would crack down on Corporate America’s offshoring of an estimated $2 trillion in profits, one of the relatively few bipartisan issues that can win GOP votes on Capitol Hill. Clinton also promises an “exit tax” for U.S. companies that reincorporate themselves offshore.
Yet Clintonomics is on the whole market-friendly. Clinton wants tax credits for businesses that employ apprentices, and for those that set up profit-sharing programs for employees. She has suggested she will loosen regulation of community banks and credit unions.
On pocketbook issues that are the most assured vote-getters, Clinton is an attractive successor to Barack Obama. Yet Clinton is the least popular major-party candidate for the U.S. presidency in modern times, with a negative public-approval rating of 69 per cent. (Trump barely tops her, at a negative 71 per cent.)
And so, Clinton has yet again waged an ineffectual campaign.
It’s not enough to say that Trump has sucked all the oxygen out of the campaign.
Fearful of playing to her know-itall persona, Clinton has missed the chance to position herself as a fighter for the middle- and working-classes. She actually favours the so-called “plain option” in health insurance, which effectively is Canadian-style single-payer government health insurance. But probably one American in a thousand knows of Clinton’s bold commitment on that issue.
Most troubling is that Clinton hasn’t campaigned on the issue at the core of America’s discontent: the income inequality that arises from previous governments (in the U.S. and Canada) having failed to prepare workers for a globalizing world.
Many elements of the Clinton platform do just that. But presented, as they are, in a hodgepodge rather than holistic way, they don’t give Clinton the aura of a champion of the disadvantaged.
Which, as it happens, Clinton would likely be as president. dolive@thestar.ca