The Empire Strikes Back

[JackLuis]

The Empire Strikes Back

Moderate ‘New Democrats’ fear Bernie and Hillary are running too far to the left

Leading architects of the “New Democrat” movement are sounding the alarm over a lurch to the left in the party, after candidates at the latest presidential primary debate confirmed a resurgence of more populist economic policies.

Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley spoke passionately about the need to reduce wage inequality and corporate power during a forum in South Carolina on Friday night in which all three distanced themselves from the establishment orthodoxy that has long prevailed in Washington.

It followed a similar performance from Clinton at the first official debate in Las Vegas last month that restored her lead over Sanders – who describes himself as a democratic socialist – but has nonetheless left the party with one of its most radical policy platforms in decades.

Yet signs are growing of a backlash within what remains of the party’s more business-friendly and economically conservative New Democrat wing.

At Columbia University in New York this weekend the Progressive Policy Institute , which helped Bill Clinton and Tony Blair pioneer so-called third way politics in the 1990s, held a closed-door strategy session for congressional staffers that was designed to find ways of promoting growth.

“There is no question that the prevailing temper of the Democratic party is populist: strongly sceptical of what we like to call capitalism and angry about the perceived power of the monied elite in politics,” says PPI president and founder Will Marshall.

“But inequality is not the biggest problem we face: it is symptomatic of the biggest problem we face, which is slow growth.”

Wall Street is worried. Slow growth of the financial sector scares them.

 

[BotanyBoy]

Sounds like the "Wall St Democrats" are trying paint their own as being for the little guy as Sanders.