The instructive point here, though, is not that Clinton would profess to share the values of Republican donors in order to garner their support. Rather, it is that she really does share their values.
In other words, it was Clinton's attempt to attract the support of the younger, more progressive wing of the Democratic base that represented a diversion from her natural position on the political spectrum. Now that she has a substantial lead over her opponent, she is returning home, politically speaking, and attempting to reap the rewards.
On various issues, as many commentators have observed, Clinton is well to the right of much of the mainstream Democratic Party — which is, itself, far to the right of the Democratic tradition represented by Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Over the years has lobbied for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, helped sell fracking to the world, advocated welfare reform, spoken out in favor of her husband's crime bill, and raised funds from the same sources tapped by conservative Republicans.
And whenever Bernie Sanders raises the latter issue, Clinton is quick to accuse him of smear tactics. She forgets that her fundraising record speaks for itself.
Clinton is also a veritable hawk who seems, as Kevin Drum has observed, to not have learned anything from America's most recent interventions in the Middle East, from Iraq to Libya. It comes as no surprise, then, that she shamelessly touts the support of Henry Kissinger, Jack Keane, and other figures in America's interventionist foreign policy establishment.
She embodies what scholars like Thomas Ferguson and public figures like Ralph Nader have warned of for years: The right turn of the Democratic Party.
Nader once remarked that the "only difference between Al Gore and George W. Bush is the velocity with which their knees hit the floor when corporations knock." And this was long before the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling, which completed the corporate takeover of both political parties.
Now, while political divisions appear, on the surface, to be peaking, both parties are remarkably similar on the most consequential issues, from aggression in the realm of foreign policy to neoliberalism in the realm of economics.
The so-called New Democrats, who rose to prominence during the presidency of Bill Clinton, are no longer new. They are the standard-bearers of a party that has capitulated to the Republican agenda on welfare, taxes, trade, and Wall Street deregulation.
In reaching out to Republican donors and appealing to their common ideological core, the campaign of Hillary Clinton is doing out in the open what Democrats have been doing behind closed doors for years.
"Democrats," argues T.A. Frank in Vanity Fair, "are becoming the party of the 1 percent."
With the rise of Hillary Clinton, "are becoming" will soon make the transition to "have become." Clinton's flippant dismissal of those who question her commitment to the causes championed by Bernie Sanders — specifically, substantial reform of both Wall Street and the campaign finance system — is compelling evidence for this conclusion. But more telling is the fact that the Democratic Party has fallen in line, deploying the feeble justification that Clinton, despite her startling flaws, will "get things done."
But as we have seen, "getting things done" more often than not means favoring an agenda that places the interests of major corporations above those of working people, war over peace, and environmental destruction over environmental justice.
"The problem with Hillary Clinton," observes Naomi Klein, "isn't just her corporate cash. It's her corporate worldview."
The same can be said of her allies in the Democratic Party, who long ago abandoned any pretense of representing working Americans.
Why else would the patrons of ultra-conservatism, when faced with the prospect of a disruptive Trump presidency, find it so easy to shift their allegiances to the party next door?
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/05/09/clinton-campaign-republican-donors-hillary-shares-your-values
