Advisers told me it was an elaborate, even West Wing-style policy process, with concentric circles of advisers and pollsters who are cooking up a comprehensive economic policy, some of which will be for public consumption, some of which will be employed if she’s elected. Over the past year, Clinton has quietly met with a rotating—and sharp-elbowed—cast of Democratic economic experts, pollsters, staffers and advocates to craft a just-so economic program to attack wage stagnation and economic inequality. The very explicit goal has been political: to invent a program for Clinton that captures the popular imagination—and, to no small extent, redefines a candidate with a trustworthiness problem.
“We’re talking about three- and four-hour meetings, briefing papers, weeks of back-and-forth,” says Clinton’s communications director Jennifer Palmieri, who says the candidate will unveil pieces of her agenda, one by one, in a series of events starting in July and stretching to the fall. “This is the foundational work of the election. She’s a wonk. This is stuff she loves to do.”
What’s emerging—and her staff maintains she’s made no big decisions on the stickiest subjects, such as whether to propose tax increases and Wall Street regulation—are classic Clinton thread-the-needle proposals, albeit with a slightly sharper needle, pointing unmistakably to the left.
Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz had a one-on-one meeting with Clinton last December to discuss his aggressive progressive agenda, pushing for deep tax cuts against the wealthy and pay cuts for CEOs. She already knew the subject inside out, he told me, and probed him for details on how some of his proposals could be implemented. Like most of the economists and advocates she’s met with recently, Stiglitz left satisfied he’d gotten a fair hearing, but with no concrete commitment.
.....
The goal, according to a dozen people close to the process who spoke to POLITICO, is to find the “sweet spot”—bold solutions that aren’t too bold. She has tasked her small in-house policy team led by former State Department aide Jake Sullivan with a pragmatic mission: Attack the biggest problems—higher education debt, a tax system that encourages short-term gain over long-tern investments, out-of-control CEO pay, crumbling infrastructure, the non-job-security “gig” economy, women’s pay equity—in a way that satisfies a restive left wing of the party. But do it without needlessly alienating general election voters, or potential donors.
....
Two years ago, Tanden, now the head of the Clinton-friendly Center for American Progress—who is still in frequent contact with Clinton and CAP founder John Podesta who is the campaign’s chairman—embarked on an ambitious effort to create a comprehensive Democratic blueprint for tacking these problems. The effort didn’t have Clinton’s official sanction, but she was kept in the loop and its mission statement fits Clinton’s own private assessment of the problem. Middle-income wage stagnation and growth that benefits only the wealthiest “is an economic problem that threatens to become a problem for [the] political system—and for the idea of democracy itself,” the report found.
The report, co-authored by Larry Summers, the former treasury secretary for Clinton’s husband who later emerged as a contentious leader of Obama’s initial economic team in the White House and whose mere presence in Clinton’s camp makes Warren and other liberals nervous, but he too was an enthusiastic backer of the campaign’s pragmatic progressive approach. Many of the positions that will form the core of Clinton’s platform are in it, I’m told—from phased-in minimum wage hikes pegged to local market conditions to the elimination of “carried interest” tax breaks for hedge funds to the extension of the Earned Income Tax Credit to encompass a greater number of working-class Americans.
....
For the most part, however, Clinton has courted, not confronted, the left. Her policy shop has already laid out a series of proposals geared toward energizing the party’s base (and denying the progressive high ground to Sangers and O’Malley)
.....
She has also surrounded herself with leading progressive theorists and researchers. Arguably, the most influential thinker Clinton’s orbit these days is Harvard professor and political scientist Robert Putnam, whose recent work on the lack of social mobility in underprivileged communities has captured her imagination and influenced her approach to policy prescriptions.
Clinton—who devoured his most recent book Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, met with Putnam for several hours in May and peppered him with questions about his research, which have centered on the structure of families and the role of a parents’ educational attainment in determining the economic mobility of their children. She has also rekindled a relationship with Harvard economist Lawrence Katz, who was the chief economist at her husband’s labor department and has also studied the link between economic opportunity and mobility. Another economist Clinton is close to: CAP’s Heather Boushey, who has studied the impact of economic inequality and families.
