The Pro Hillary Thread

Hillary Clinton has received a lot of campaign money from the financial industry over the years, and after she left the State Department she gave several lucrative speeches to Goldman Sachs and other big banks. As Michael Hirsh puts it, this has given her a reputation for being "more than a little cozy" with Wall Street.

But is she? The truth is that I haven't paid much attention to this question. In terms of the presidential campaign, it's pretty obvious that Bernie Sanders is a lot tougher on the financial industry than she is. The details of their plans don't really matter. Sanders has practically made a career out of attacking Wall Street. As president, he'd make financial regulation a top priority; he'd appoint tougher watchdogs; and he'd use the bully pulpit relentlessly to call out Wall Street's sins.

Still, what about Clinton? How cozy with the financial industry is she? I asked about this on Twitter over the weekend, figuring that all the Bernie supporters would give me an earful. But no such luck. Mostly they just told me that she had taken Wall Street money and given Wall Street speeches. The only concrete criticism was one that Elizabeth Warren made in 2004: that Clinton had changed her view on the bankruptcy bill after she accepted lots of Wall Street money to get elected to the Senate.

But that didn't really hold water. She opposed the bill in 1999 because she wanted alimony and child-support payments to take precedence over credit card companies during bankruptcy proceeding. The bill passed anyway, but Bill Clinton vetoed it. In 2001, she brokered a compromise that gave priority to alimony and child support, and then voted for the bill. It didn't pass at the time, and in 2005 her compromise was removed from the bill. She said then that she opposed it.

This is classic Hillary. Once George Bush was president, she had no way of stopping the bill—so she worked hard behind the scenes to get what she could in return for her vote. Love it or hate it, this is the kind of pragmatic politics she practices. But there's no hypocrisy here; no change of heart thanks to Wall Street money (she supported the bill when it protected women and children and opposed it when it didn't); and no real support for the financial industry.

What else? Clinton says she gave several speeches in 2007 warning about the dangers of derivatives and subprime loans, and introduced proposals for stronger financial oversight. Apparently that's true. I'm not aware if she took a stand on the repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999, but I don't think this was responsible for the financial crisis and wouldn't hold it against her either way. (And it was supported by nearly the entire Democratic Party at the time.) The CFMA did make the financial crisis worse, but Bernie Sanders himself supported it. Clinton voted for Sarbanes-Oxley, but everyone else did too.

Clinton has consistently supported increasing the minimum wage—though not to $15. She supported the Lilly Ledbetter Act. She supports higher taxes on the wealthy. She supported repeal of the carried interest loophole in 2007. The Boston Globe, after an extensive review of her voting record in the Senate, summed up her attitude with this quote from a lobbyist: "The financial sector viewed her as neutral. Not helpful, but also not harmful." Citizens for Tax Justice gives her a generally favorable grade on financial issues.

The word "cozy" does a whole lot of heavy lifting in stories about Hillary Clinton and Wall Street. But what does it mean? Does she have an actual record of supporting Wall Street interests? By ordinary standards, is her current campaign proposal for financial regulation a strong one? (I've been impressed by her rhetorical emphasis on shadow banking, but it's not clear just how far her proposals go in real life.) Has she protected financial interests against the Bernie Sanders of the world?

I think it's safe to say that Clinton has hardly been a scourge of the banking industry. Until recently, her main interests were elsewhere. But if there's a strong case to be made for "coziness," I've failed to find it. Anyone care to point me in the right direction?

And she gets Republicans to do the dirty work for her.

With Ted Cruz and John Kasich out of the race, Donald Trump has become the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. On Wednesday, Hillary Clinton's campaign wasted no time switching to general election mode, releasing a web video criticizing Trump. But Clinton didn't do it in her own words; the ad is a compilation of unkind things Trump's fellow Republicans have said about him during the party's nomination campaign.

It's harsh. Mitt Romney calls Trump a misogynist, Marco Rubio claims he's the most "vulgar person to ever aspire to the presidency," and Jeb Bush says Trump needs therapy.

It looks like the Clinton campaign isn't going to let any of the #NeverTrump Republicans forget that stance anytime soon.

This particular investigation, titled “Expert Decision Making in Evolving Situations,” gave 11 groups of Army intelligence analysts a realistic battlefield scenario and asked them to assess the most likely avenue for an enemy attack. The scenarios were largely the same, though with slight variations to produce different answers. Each group was given time to study and each expressed confidence in their answers.

The noteworthy stuff is what came next. The groups were given updated intelligence reports and asked to reconsider their assessments. Some reports contained items confirming initial judgements. Others were designed to spur skepticism. The majority were neutral. The process was then repeated two more times.

In the aggregate, the level of confidence should have stayed roughly the same. But what the researchers found was that the groups grew more convinced in their initial judgements the more information they received. Only one of the 11 teams changed its assessment of how the enemy would attack. Seven of the 11 teams expressed more confidence in their call over time.

Additionally, the subjects gave significantly more weight to information that reinforced their earlier decisions. Not only that, but when presented with contradictory evidence, they were dismissive or downplayed its significance. ...

“The results of this experiment lend support to the general conclusion that trained subjects in an evolving, realistic, decision environment demonstrate performance characteristics similar to those of novices working with less realistic and relatively more static scenarios,” the study read. “Specifically, confidence in an initial hypothesis is generally high, regardless of the hypothesis.”...

Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, filleted a field of 17 Republican primary candidates by branding them in uniquely terrible ways: Little Marco Rubio, Lyin’ Ted Cruz and Low Energy Jeb Bush. With his attention shifting to November, the fear among preternaturally panicked Democrats is that he will do the same against his likely opponent: Hillary Clinton. Trump has already begun trying, adding the descriptive “Crooked” to her first name.

But political scientists and branding experts aren’t so sure that he’ll find much success. And it goes back to “Expert Decision Making in Evolving Situations.” Referencing that specific study, Timothy Calkins, a clinical professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, noted just how hard it is to mold perceptions when people have already thought through their choices.

“It is very hard to reposition a well-established brand, and what we have here are two really well-established brands,” Calkins said of the election matchup. “There is a whole idea of mental exhaustion. When you force people to really think about something, it is difficult and challenging. And the easy thing to do is to just not think about it. For someone to really challenge and change their beliefs requires a lot of energy.”

At the Presidential Debates the audience is reminded to hold applause until after the debate is over. Trump needs a receptive group off which to bounce his happy patter. In his interview with the Washington Post, it was shocking to read the transcript, it was a whole lot of nothing, full of all the carnival barker stuff, like a used car salesman on the last day of the month. I sincerely hope he can't back out of the debates because without the jeering masses everyone can see what kind of a leader he would be.