The place looked sun-beaten and dilapidated. It’s one of history’s anomalies that she could soon be in a position to prove that politics still works-that it can better the lives of Americans, including those who despise Clinton and her kind.Ī few years ago, on a rural highway south of Tampa, I saw a metal warehouse with a sign that said “ american dream welding + fabrication.” Broken vehicles and busted equipment were scattered around the yard. During this period, her party lost its working-class base. “Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose, but we haven’t had a coherent, compelling economic case that needs to be made in order to lay down a foundation on which to both conduct politics and do policy.”Ĭlinton has been in politics throughout these decades of economic stagnation and inequality, of political Balkanization, of weakening faith in American institutions and leaders. “We have been fighting out elections in general on a lot of noneconomic issues over the past thirty years,” she said-social issues, welfare, crime, war. Democrats, we are the party of working people, but we haven’t done a good enough job showing we get what you’re going through.” One didn’t often hear that thought from Democratic politicians, and I asked Clinton what she had meant by it. But right now an awful lot of people feel there is less and less respect for the work they do. In her acceptance speech at the Philadelphia Convention, she said, “Americans are willing to work-and work hard. The thumps got harder when Clinton turned to the Democratic Party. Her ideas are progressive but incrementalist: raise the federal minimum wage to twelve dollars an hour, but not fifteen support free trade, as long as workers’ rights are protected and corporations aren’t allowed to evade regulations. “I want to really marry the public and the private sector,” she said. She said, “We have come to heavily favor the financial markets over the otherwise productive markets,” including manufacturing, “which have been pushed to a narrower place within the over-all economy while an enormous amount of intelligence, effort, and dollars went into spinning transactions.” As she plunged into the details, her eyes widened, her color rose, and her finger occasionally gave the table a thump for emphasis. She wants to use tax incentives and other enticements to nudge corporations into focussing less on share price and more on “long-term investments,” in research, equipment, and workers. And I think we Democrats have not provided as clear a message about how we see the economy as we need to.” She continued, “We need to get back to claiming the economic mantle-that we are the ones who create the jobs, who provide the support that is needed to get more fairness into the economy.”Ĭlinton has given a lot of thought to economic policy. “Donald Trump came up with a fairly simple, easily understood, and to some extent satisfying story. So pick the guy who’s the outsider, pick the guy who’s giving you an explanation-in my view, a trumped-up one, not convincing-but, nevertheless, people are hungry for that.” Voters needed a narrative for their lives, she said, including someone to blame for what had gone wrong. “It was certainly a rejection of every other Republican running. “It’s ‘Pox on both your houses,’ ” Clinton said. ![]() Why were so many downwardly mobile white Americans supporting Donald Trump? With only a few weeks left until the election, I wanted to ask her about the voters she’s had the most trouble winning. She’s the officer who keeps on marching in mud. ![]() Politics, at times so thrilling, is generally a dismal business, and Clinton’s acceptance of this is key to her power. Her eyes were narrower than usual-fatigue-and she wore a knee-length dress jacket of steel-blue leather, buttoned to the lapels its metallic shine gave an impression of armor, as if she’d just descended from the battlefield to take a breather in this underground hideout. She sat at a small round table with a cloth draped to the carpet. A meeting room with beige walls and headachy light, cavernous enough to accommodate three hundred occupants but empty, except for Hillary Clinton. Democrats can reclaim the “economic mantle,” Clinton said, adding, “I want to really marry the public and the private sector.” Photograph by Philip Montgomery for The New Yorker
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