The Clinton Pandermobile Road Show
We need a holiday from Hillary Clinton’s gas tax holiday pander. Now she is pinning the “elite” label on economists who express skepticism about her support for John McCain’s sham “relief plan” for the skyrocketing cost of filling a car’s gas tank:
Clinton used her appearance on ABC’s “This Week” to raise questions about Obama’s ability to connect with working-class Americans while dismissing economists who have said her plan to suspend gas taxes over the summer would do little good.
“I’m not going to put my lot in with economists,” the New York senator said when asked to name a credible economist who supported her proposal.
“We’ve got to get out of this mind-set where somehow elite opinion is always on the side of doing things that really disadvantage the vast majority of Americans,” said Clinton, a former first lady who would be the first woman president.
Now, I’m the first to agree that ivory tower economic theorists can be blind to the reality of ordinary Americans’ lives if that reality conflicts with their Friedmanesque (Milton, not Thomas) ideology and Bushian faith in metrics. But that’s not what’s going on here. Nobody in this entire damn country is more rooted and steeped in elitism than is Sen. Clinton. She did not grow up poor or working class, she and her husband are worth, combined, probably billions, and she has no idea — none whatsoever — of what it’s like to not be able to get to work (if you have a job) because gas is $4 a gallon and you don’t have the money to fill your tank. This “gas tax holiday” scheme is worthless, and she knows it. And doesn’t care, as long as it’s “polling well.”
