Re: Elizabeth Warren

From:dschwerin@hrcoffice.com To: cheryl.mills@gmail.com, Jake.Sullivan@gmail.com, robbymook@gmail.com, john.podesta@gmail.com, pir@hrcoffice.com, nmerrill@hrcoffice.com Date: 2015-01-08 02:38 Subject: Re: Elizabeth Warren

Dan Geldon, the Warren aide I met with yesterday, emailed about this story and said “found the WSJ's write-up if you've seen it to be extraordinarily aggressive on their part. She didn't say anything about economic metrics (along the lines we discussed yesterday) that she hasn't been saying for years, never criticized the Secretary by name or even in a veiled way, etc. -- they took a lot of liberties with their interpretation.” ---------- Forwarded message ---------- I think this blog overstates what Warren was doing, but we need to craft the economic message for Hillary so that Warren’s common inaccurate conclusions are addressed. Xoxo Lynn http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2015/01/07/warren-throws-four-punchs-at-the-clintons/ Sen. Elizabeth Warren professes that she is not running for president, but her Wednesday speech to a major labor conference is loaded with not-terribly-veiled references to Hillary Clinton and attacks on Bill Clinton’s record as president. The Massachusetts Democrat’s prepared remarks to the AFL-CIO’s National Summit on Wages in Washington are a lesson in progressive economic theory. In this retelling, landmark free trade deals and banking deregulation boost the fortunes of the wealthy at the expense of the poor and middle class. Criticism of the Clintons is threaded throughout Ms. Warren’s remarks. Most comes in the form of a liberal critique of Mr. Clinton’s economic record, but there is one significant shot at Mrs. Clinton as well. Of course, Ms. Warren has insisted she isn’t running for president but has couched it in the present tense, most recently last month when she refused to rule out a run during an interview with NPR<http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2014/12/15/elizabeth-warren-again-i-am-not-running-for-president/>. Washington Wire found at least four instances in Ms. Warren’s Wednesday speech in which she takes political shots at the Clintons. The Wal-Mart<http://online.wsj.com/public/quotes/main.html?type=djn&symbol=WMT> WMT +1.48%<http://blogs.wsj.com/public/quotes/main.html?type=djn&symbol=WMT?mod=inlineTicker> dog-whistle: “Corporate profits and GDP are up. But if you work at Wal-Mart, and you are paid so little that you still need food stamps to put groceries on the table, what does more money in stockholders’ pockets and an uptick in GDP do for you?” Wal-Mart is a regular bogeyman for Big Labor, but it is also a particularly tough attack for Mrs. Clinton to echo, since she served on the retailer’s board of directors for six years when her husband was the Arkansas governor. The tie was regularly brought up by supporters of Mrs. Clinton’s opponents during the 2008 presidential primary campaign and remains well remembered in Iowa, where several Democrats raised it unprompted during interviews last week<http://www.wsj.com/articles/top-iowa-democrats-slow-to-rally-around-hillary-clinton-1420418121>. “Even though they don’t exist anymore, her connections to Wal-Mart, those don’t sit well,” said Jennifer Herrington, the Democratic Party chairwoman in Page County. “People still talk about it. The sense is that not much has really changed.” Bill Clinton was just as bad as the Republicans: “Pretty much the whole Republican Party – and, if we’re going to be honest, too many Democrats – talked about the evils of ‘big government’ and called for deregulation. It sounded good, but it was really about tying the hands of regulators and turning loose big banks and giant international corporations to do whatever they wanted to do.” Part of the Hillary Clinton argument is that her husband’s presidency presided over the economic growth of the 1990s. But here Ms. Warren takes direct aim at Mr. Clinton’s record on deregulation and harkens back to his 1996 State of the Union address and its signature line<http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=53091>, “The era of big government is over.” NAFTA was a bad deal: “Look at the choices Washington has made, the choices that have left America’s middle class in a deep hole… The choice to sign trade pacts and tax deals that let subsidized manufacturers around the globe sell here in America while good American jobs get shipped overseas.” Labor has long been sour on free-trade agreements, and Mr. Obama during the 2008 campaign said he would renegotiate it, though that never happened. Mrs. Clinton at the time also said she would seek a better NAFTA deal with Canada and Mexico<http://www.wsj.com/news/articles/SB120459602445109371?mod=rss_Politics_And_Policy&mg=reno64-wsj>, but it becomes politically difficult for her to offer substantive critiques of her husband’s White House record. Mr. Clinton wasn’t good for the middle class: “So who got the increase in income over the last 32 years? One hundred percent of it went to the top 1%. All of the new money earned in this economy over the past generation — all that growth in the GDP — went to the top. All of it.” Here Ms. Warren makes a potent argument that Mr. Clinton – and by association, Mrs. Clinton – had the same results for the middle class as Republican presidents. By tying the records of the Reagan, Clinton, Obama and two Bush administrations together, Ms. Warren paints herself as the outside-the-system crusader her supporters want her to be.