Clinton whines that “the rich” unduly influence politics

posted at 3:10 pm on December 26, 2007 by Bryan
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The NY Sun might as well have asked: Would you like some cheese?

Now that Mayor Bloomberg is getting ready to spend hundreds of millions — maybe even more than a billion — of his own dollars on a presidential run that, if executed properly, would take the electoral votes of New York and California and Florida and Massachusetts out of the Hillary Clinton column and into the Michael Bloomberg column, President Clinton is suddenly coming down with the fantods about the dangers of self-financed political campaigns.

“We are very frustrated because we have a Supreme Court that seems determined to say that the wealthier have more right to free speech than the rest of us,” President Clinton said in Iowa on Sunday, according to Politico, complaining that such spending violates “the spirit of campaign finance reform.”

“…the rest of us.” Bill Clinton has become filthy rich since leaving the presidency. These days he’s always seen in the company of the world’s power elite, people who can write multi-million dollar checks to his library fund. For him to talk about “the rest of us” as though he’s not among the world’s upper crust is, as usual, a shameless lie.

The Sun editorial goes on to list rich Democrats from the Kennedys to Jay Rockefeller to Jon Corzine to Eliot Spitzer to John Kerry, who have all financed their political aspirations with their personal (or married into, in Kerry’s case) fortunes. Clinton has never seen fit to criticize any of that. The editorial doesn’t mention the billionaire behind much of the hard left, namely George Soros, or his bankrolling of pro-Clinton gatekeeper and watchdog Media Matters for America. Clinton hasn’t whined about any of that either.

As for “the spirit of campaign finance reform,” it wasn’t the Supreme Court’s campaign funny money shenanigans in 1996 that got spun into an astroturfed drive for reform. And it wasn’t the Supreme Court that drafted a law that made it easier for the likes of Soros to fund his own shadow campaigns to attack conservatives and generate false media controversies from the shadows. The Supremes ratified much of that law, but Clinton’s 1996 violations prompted the need for “reform” in the first place, and Democrats with the support of “Maverick” McCain were behind the law in the first place. The campaign finance “reform” that Clinton is decrying wouldn’t have happened without his abuses and his own party’s braying.

What actually bothers the Clintons about Bloomberg is that he might put liberal states like New York into play if he runs as an independent, but Clinton is cloaking that realpolitik assessment in the trappings of concern for the “little people” about whom Clinton has never actually cared at all. That’s the truth, and since he was at the center of all that campaign finance history, Clinton is surely aware of it all. But the truth is, as usual, inconvenient to Bill Clinton.

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