‘Progressive” is a funny word, one that often means the opposite of what it appears to mean. Hillary Rodham Clinton is a wanton and shameless trafficker in Nineties nostalgia, but the odd fact is that she intends to be sworn in as president in 2017 with the Democratic platform from 1948: weaponizing the tax code for use against disfavored businesses while offering rich new subsidies for compliant corporations, raising the minimum wage, aggrandizing the micromanagerial powers of the Department of Labor, expanding our already insolvent entitlements, adding mightily to our zero-return “investments” in government-school bureaucracies and dodgy energy programs, etc.
At least the Democrats of 1948 were also campaigning to repeal Taft-Hartley.
Mrs. Clinton’s accomplishments are restricted almost entirely to a series of prestigious job titles. We’d say that she’s padding her résumé, but at this point in her over-ripe career Mrs. Clinton is only padding her obituary, which is a morbid thing to do. She was an undistinguished senator holding office in a freshly adopted Democratic bastion as a craven tribute to her husband, and then she was a feckless and destructive secretary of state whose wake of incompetence spread, and spreads still, from Moscow to Tripoli. Now she seeks to attain the presidency on a series of intellectually dishonest and lightly considered economic nostrums.