The Roosevelt Institute: Could Hillary Clinton Become the Champion of the 99 Percent?

I hope readers of Reckonings will take a little time this Sunday (or before online) to peruse this week's cover story in The New York Times Magazine. The Roosevelt Institute is doing its best to make Hillary Clinton the champion of the 99 percent. It will be a challenging job, but given the alternatives, an extraordinarily important one. Here is a paragraph from a note by Jake Silverstein, Editor in Chief of The NYT Magazine:

"When Hillary Clinton officially began her presidential campaign in June 2015, she did it with a speech on economic policy on New York City’s Roosevelt Island, in which she declared: 'Prosperity can’t be just for C.E.O.s and hedge-fund managers. Democracy can’t just be for the billionaires and corporations.' It was rhetoric that sounded as much like Bernie Sanders as anything Clinton herself had said before, and it bore the fingerprints of a little-known think tank, housed in a nondescript Manhattan office building, called the Roosevelt Institute.

Associated with thinkers like Elizabeth Warren and Joseph Stiglitz, Roosevelt has been quietly drawing up blueprints for what it envisions as a truly mainstream economic populism — the kind that could be advanced as easily by an establishment candidate like Clinton as by a gate-crasher like Sanders. In this week’s cover story, Gideon Lewis-Kraus explores the hopes that Roosevelt’s constellation of progressive policy wonks, on the eve of the Democratic National Convention, have for a prospective Clinton administration — and their fears that the Democratic Party’s old instincts may thwart them."

Here is an excerpt from The Times Magazine cover story. It highlights a paper, “Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy,” written by the economist Joseph Stiglitz and published by the Roosevelt Institute in June. "Rewriting the Rules" is characterized by The Times as "an inventive combination of narrative history and policy platform. The report billed itself as a comprehensive agenda to ameliorate inequality. First, it said, inequality is a choice, not an inevitable byproduct of technology, globalization and the uneven distribution of personal virtue. Second, it held that the longstanding notion of an economic trade-off between growth and equality is a fiction."

"Unlike the myriad other white papers that each week were drafted, edited, somnolently received at other think tanks and shelved without fanfare, this report — original not so much in its ideas as in its clarity and vigor — had captured wide and consequential attention. In the months leading up to its publication, the Roosevelt team was in close touch with Clinton speechwriters and advisers, and in subsequent rallies the candidate continued to draw upon the report, even at the level of explicit language; calls to 'rewrite the rules' found their way into more of her addresses...."

"Much of the left, including the significant bloc that rejected Clinton in the primaries in favor of Bernie Sanders and his call for 'revolution,' finds Wong and her allies delusional in their hope that 'Rewriting the Rules' might be realized in Democratic Party practice. But the Sanders and Trump insurrections revealed an appetite for economic populism that no one in either party establishment had quite anticipated. Now Roosevelt and other progressive groups are wagering that a mandate for economic overhaul might already exist, and that it might even be carried out by the woman who always was the party’s near-certain nominee. Wong herself believes that the financial crisis radically destabilized the politics of the American economy, possibly for decades to come, and that 2016 might well mark the early commotion of a genuine political realignment."

 

 

 

 

 

 

Felicia Wong, President and

CEO of The Roosevelt Institute