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“As a campaigner, Hillary can do a shot and a beer better than Barack Obama can,” Shapiro says. So there’s that.
As a reporter and columnist for Time, Newsweek, the Washington Post, USAToday, Esquire, Salon, and other publications, Walter Shapiro has covered nine presidential elections and the nation’s politics for four decades. He is currently a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University and a lecturer in political science at Yale while he finishes a book about his great-uncle, a vaudevillian and con man who once swindled Hitler.
Shapiro is also an accomplished Hillary-ologist, having first interviewed Hillary Clinton in the Arkansas governor’s mansion for Time in September 1992. In early May, Shapiro sat down with Prospect editor-at-large Harold Meyerson to talk about a question he’s internally debated for years: On balance, would a Hillary Clinton candidacy and presidency be a good or bad thing for the liberal cause?
To put it crudely, the dilemma facing the Democratic party comes down to this: Will Dems decide next time to stand with the working people, or will they stick with their big-money friends in finance and business? Some twenty years ago, Bill Clinton taught Democrats how they can have it both ways. Take Wall Street’s money—gobs of it—while promising to govern on a heart-felt agenda of “Putting People First.”
Hillary Clinton has a unique asset if she runs for president — Bill Clinton, who presided over a booming economy and an era of sunny Democratic centrism.
But she also faces a singular challenge: convincing voters who are skeptical of some Wall Street-friendly policies during his tenure that she can connect with their concerns at a time when the wealth gap is massive between the very rich and everyone else.
After a decade and a half of being tethered to her husband’s record, Hillary Clinton established her own political identity as senator and as secretary of state. But a string of questions from interviewers during her book tour about her husband’s tenure as president underscores the ongoing issue she will face reconciling their past with her future. Continue reading A Clinton approach for angrier times | POLITICO→
