Hillary Clinton's Sins

I've got a new piece at Shareblue on the incoherent and irreconcilable attacks on Hillary Clinton:

Much of this election has centered around attacking Hillary Clinton for standing the line on behalf of people under legislative and rhetorical assault by her political opponents. And they come from two angles: That she has been corrupted by institutional power, and that she has been corrupted by "political correctness."

What is continually fascinating about the attacks on Clinton is that they are fundamentally irreconcilable. On the one hand, she is attacked for doing the bidding of powerful corporate special interests. On the other hand, she is attacked for being beholden to marginalized, identity-based special interest groups.

Both cannot be true, because those respective groups have competing and mutually exclusive needs and objectives.

What is true, however, is that we have seen Clinton, over and over, leverage her relationships with influential, wealthy institutions and individuals in order to convince them to move the needle on their priorities and/or to donate resources to be used on behalf of her marginalized constituencies.

As always, click through to read the whole thing!

These attacks, of course, come from both Hillary Clinton's right and from her left. The latter is particularly curious to me, because what progressives say we expect of people in power, and of one another, is to leverage our privilege on behalf of people without it.

Clinton's career looks precisely like that on a grand scale. That she has credibility with power-brokers gives her that leverage. Credibility grants access. It isn't the access itself that is the issue, as is central to most of these critiques. It's what someone does with that access.

And it's pretty clear to me, after having studied her record for decades, that she leverages it pretty spectacularly.

That doesn't mean perfectly. It means better than just about anyone else, and maybe everyone else.