How lucky is Hillary Clinton that her sole (credible) competitor for the Democratic nomination for president is a dyspeptic, self-described socialist who doesn’t appear to actually wish to be president? So lucky that nearly a year out from the 2016 election, she’s already running her general election campaign.
Consider the current contretemps between Clinton and Bernie Sanders over taxes. Sanders supports implementing a national single-payer health care system, which he would partially pay for by raising taxes on the middle class. Clinton’s campaign, for its part, has responded ferociously to the proposal, with spokesman Brian Fallon saying, “Hillary Clinton believes strongly that middle-class families deserve a raise, not a tax increase,” and “If you are truly concerned about raising incomes for middle-class families, the last thing you should do is cut their take-home pay right off the bat by raising their taxes.” Thus, while the GOP candidates still engaged in their battle to be seen by primary voters as the most “conservative,” Clinton can busy herself appealing to the center by posing as a sort of liberal-leaning Grover Norquist.
In the long run, Clinton’s rhetoric is bad news for the left: the Democratic standard-bearer appears to have adopted the conservative view that taxes are a scourge—a punishment—and not, as Oliver Wendell Holmes piously put it, “the price we pay for a civilized society.” But the Clintons are of course willing to pay just about any price to get back into the White House.
