Thursday, August 4, 2016

Rigged or fixed

From Mickey Kaus's Notes on Hillary’s acceptance speech:
"'I alone can fix it.' Hillary repeatedly mocked this Trump claim as authoritarian. I don’t like it much myself. But there’s a sense in which it is true. If, as Hillary claims, the power of money in politics is so great that good policies can’t get enacted, then it really is only a rich or wildly famous self-funder, one who doesn’t need to suck up to donors, who can fix it. Donor money was blocking political solutions — e.g., Wall Street regulations — before Citizen’s United, after all.

"In fact, Trump said 'I alone can fix it' in exactly this campaign finance context. ('When [the] Secretary of State rakes in millions of dollars trading access and favors to special interests [I] know the time for action has come. ... I have seen firsthand how the system is rigged against our citizens.') It wasn’t a general statement of indispensability."

Much as President Reagan made the limited, not general, claim,
"In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem"
in his first inaugural address, see Reagan remembered.

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