CT Blue

Look’s like the broad outlines of Hillary’s campaign to free the middle class are coming into focus:

One of Hillary Clinton’s new senior policy advisers, Ann O’Leary, is giving the clearest signal yet that Clinton plans to make the right to take paid time off from work—after child birth or to care for a newborn or perhaps an ailing relative—a central feature of her campaign.

via Daily Kos

Don’t get me wrong. Paid leave is a very nice thing. But the sad fact is that it’s nibbling around the edges of what ails us, and the focus on this relatively trivial issue is all too typical of the Democrats. While the Republicans wage holy war on behalf of those good old 15th Century values, we offer paid leave. I’m sure there are people that will get so energized by the prospect of paid leave that they’ll come out and vote for Democrats when they otherwise wouldn’t have voted at all. I’d put the number of such people at up to four per state. Amazingly, that might not be enough to take back the House.

The problem, particularly for Hillary, is that too many Democrats are in bed with the folks that should be their targets, the “malefactors of great wealth” to which the last decent Republican president referred, and the guys of whom his cousin said: “They are unanimous in their hate for me–and I welcome their hatred.”

The entire speech from which that quote is taken is well worth reading, and it wouldn’t hurt if some of our Democrats riffed off it. Consider this, which could be written today:

For twelve years this Nation was afflicted with hear-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing Government. The Nation looked to Government but the Government looked away. Nine mocking years with the golden calf and three long years of the scourge! Nine crazy years at the ticker and three long years in the breadlines! Nine mad years of mirage and three long years of despair! Powerful influences strive today to restore that kind of government with its doctrine that that Government is best which is most indifferent.

…

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace–business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.

They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

Consider the last paragraph especially. The truth today is that organized money is an organized mob. Giving the plebs paid leave is a meaningless gesture so long as the mobsters are allowed free rein to divert our money into their own pockets. Paid leave would be nice, but it wont fundamentally change anything, but for Hillary, that’s probably a feature and not a bug.