I don’t want to see the transcripts from Hillary Clinton’s Goldman Sachs speeches.

I’m fairly certain they would look similar to what Kevin Drum theorizes at Mother Jones: Clinton was probably unfailingly polite to her audience—as people normally are when they’re offered $225,000 for an hour of work—but that’s likely about the extent of it. In the post-47 percent age, politicians are so appropriately spooked that private confabs may become public that they take care in crafting remarks to interest groups. That’s especially true of a cautious politician like Hillary Clinton.

The actual transcript is unnecessary because we already have enough in the public domain to know the real issue with these speeches: the rapport and camaraderie between political leaders and financial institutions, which results in a frame of mind that accepts their arguments and privileges their views. In fact, the best example of this comes from a speech that Clinton habitually touts as an example of her get-tough approach to Wall Street.



On the stump and in debates, including last week’s in Brooklyn, Clinton highlights a speech she made at Nasdaq in December 2007, in the thick of the foreclosure crisis. “When I was serving as the senator from New York, I did stand up to the banks,” Clinton said last week. “I did make it clear that their behavior would not be excused.”



In the speech, available here, she castigated Wall Street for “playing a significant role in the current problems,” for fueling irresponsible mortgage lending through securitization, and for having “shifted risk away from people who knew what was going on onto the people who did not.” Clinton has been criticized for this speech, however, because of a few lines where she said “there’s plenty of blame to go around” for the housing bubble, and that “homebuyers who paid extra fees to avoid documenting their income should have known they were getting in over their heads.”