Illegally-obtained transcripts of Hillary Clinton’s appearances at three Goldman Sachs events published Saturday by WikiLeaks portray a different side of the Democratic nominee than the one she has advertised on the campaign trail.
While there are not any apparent bombshells in the transcripts or revelations of collusion with the industry, there are passages that would have hurt Clinton’s prospects in the Democratic primary if they had been released then, as her rival Bernie Sanders called for. Most of all, however, there are exchanges between Clinton and financiers that hint at a technocratic and centrist view of U.S. politics and world affairs, and a preference for governance from the center rather than from ideological transformation.
All three transcripts taken from Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s email account, which were marked as notarized, are from private events that took place in 2013, soon after Clinton left the State Department. The questions the bankers and businessmen were most interested in related to Clinton’s experience as top diplomat, rather than banking-specific issues that Democratic primary voters skeptical of Wall Street might have feared.
The longest exchanges centered on topics like China’s interior politics, the bloodshed in Syria, and Israel and the Middle East — all issues on which Clinton was able to speak fluently and discuss more casually than she would have in a public setting.
Nevertheless, Clinton did talk about financial policy with Goldman executives and guests, striking a conciliatory and friendly tone.
At an event in New York in October of 2013, for instance, Goldman executive Tim O’Neill thanked Clinton for being an ally of the industry as a senator from New York. The industry “really did appreciate … your continued involvement in the issues (inaudible) to be courageous in some respects to associated with Wall Street and this environment,” the transcript read.
Clinton responded with a favorable, if nonspecific, assessment of the post-crisis state of finance. “I’m not interested in, you know, turning the clock back or pointing fingers,” Clinton said.
The country needs to make sure, she said, that “we don’t kill or maim what works, but we concentrate on the most effective way of moving forward with the brainpower and the financial power that exists here.”
That answer would have been out of step with the debate in the Democratic primary, with Sanders calling for the break-up of big banks like Goldman Sachs and specifically calling out Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein as an example of greed.
So, too, would have been Clinton’s comments about regulations and regulators later in the conversation with O’Neill. There’s “nothing magic about regulations, too much is bad, too little is bad. How do you get to the golden key, how do we figure out what works?” she said. “And the people that know the industry better than anybody are the people who work in the industry.”
In contrast, liberals like Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., have sought far stricter rules and to keep financial industry veterans out of regulatory spots, and other leaked emails show that Clinton staffers felt pressure to publicly adhere to that view to avoid Warren siding with Sanders in the primary.
At other points, Clinton suggested that banks were being hampered in terms of lending by new regulations. She told the bankers that the 2010 Dodd-Frank law was attributable to the political climate and anti-bank popular sentiment at the time.
Beyond banking-specific considerations, Clinton’s conversations with Goldman Sachs suggested a level of comfort with Republicans and a preference for bipartisan compromise over high-stakes ideological confrontations.
“I personally like Speaker Boehner,” she said of former Speaker of the House John Boehner. “I’ve sympathized with him because he’s in a tough spot.” At the time, Boehner was the negotiator for Republicans in acrimonious talks with the White House about the budget and the debt ceiling that would result that year in a government shutdown.
At a June 2013 conference of CEOs, in conversation with Blankfein, Clinton extolled the benefits of political compromise.
“I don’t care if you’re a liberal icon or a conservative icon,” she told the audience. “If you are not willing to be active in your democracy and do what is necessary to deal with our problems, I think you should be voted out.”
In an October conversation with Blankfein at a summit at the Ritz-Carlton Dove Mountain resort in Arizona, Clinton expanded on her appreciation of compromise and tried to explain why it was becoming rarer in Washington. Officeholders, she complained, “are only concerned about getting a challenge from the left of the Democratic Party or a challenge from the right in the Republican Party. And they’re not representing really the full interests of the people in the area that they’re supposed to be.”
Senate rules, she suggested, should be overhauled to eliminate the filibuster that requires 60 votes to pass legislation or confirm appointees. Within a month, Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid would get rid of the 60-vote requirement for lower-level nominees.
At that same event, Clinton at one point launched into an extended monologue on her view of American society, sketching out a philosophy that sounded like it just as easily have been voiced by a conservative intellectual.
She described society as a “three-legged stool,” with one leg being the free market, another being a government that balanced oversight liberty, and the third “an active civil society. Because there’s so much about America that is volunteerism and religious faith and family and community activities.”
She had been reading the French intellectual Alexis de Tocqueville, she explained, whose book Democracy in America, written after an early 1800s trip to the U.S., has frequently been cited by conservatives. The book explains, she said, what is unique about the U.S.: “rugged individualism with a sense of, you know, community well being.”
Asked later what the country’s greatest asset was in competition with China, Clinton responded simply “freedom.”
“I think freedom,” she reiterated. “Freedom of the mind, freedom of movement, freedom of debate, freedom of innovation.”
