Secretary Clinton made a good acceptance speech at the DNC. She could have shown more empathy with the disappearing middle class, and she could have been clearer about the causes of the country’s massive economic inequality and how her solutions for it will solve the problem. But she certainly addressed the need to make the economy work for everyone, and not just the 1%, which she very much needed to do.
She did miss a great opportunity to draw a clear dividing line between herself and Trump when she talked about increasing taxes on the wealthy. She could have pointed out that if elected, she was going to push for a tax increase that would cost her money that would go to make the economy better for everyone, while Trump is proposing a tax decrease that will make him $1 million richer at the expense of everyone else. But I assume she will make that point eventually. She also, oddly, failed to call on everyone to help her fix the problems that she addressed by electing down ticket Democratic candidates who will pass the laws she will propose. Again, I assume she will get to that point in the future.
One issue she failed to address is the conflict between decrying the adverse effects of big money on public policy in the US and proposing reversing Citizens United (putting aside that as a lawyer she knows it will take years, at best, to fix the problem with a Constitutional amendment), on the one hand, and the big funder money raising machine described in the NY Times on Friday, on the other hand. Obviously, if she is to be taken seriously as an opponent of the big funder abuses of the political system, she can’t be part of that system. At a minimum, if she thinks she can’t run the kind of small contribution campaigns that President Obama and Senator Sanders ran, she needs to say publicly and often, that she has told the big funders that she will take their money but that they should understand that she is planning to fight hard for tax increases and regulations of businesses that will adversely affect them because it’s the right thing to do for the country. She should also tell them that big contributions won’t get them access to the White House and that each call from then that is taken by the White House will be matched with a call from a non-contributing citizen with an opposite viewpoint.
Finally, and unrelated to her acceptance speech, Secretary Clinton needs to rein-in her robocall campaign. I understand that she doesn’t receive robocalls herself, since her calls are screened, and thus doesn’t know how annoying they are. And I assume her staff is disconnected from real people. However, as we all know, most people hate robocalls with a passion. (Indeed, she could get not a few votes just by promising, if elected, to get the FCC to collect proposals for ways to end robocalls.) Her campaign is already making almost daily robocalls in some parts of the country and has been for a while. People are already angry about them, and some people are considering not voting for her if they don’t stop. Calls in the last week or two of a campaign are one thing, but it’s way too early for every day or every other day calls. Let the robocaller beware.