Well-worth Reading

Kevin Drum wrote an article for Mother Jones, which was reprinted on Bill Moyers' website.  It takes a fairly even-handed look on the charge --- or suggested, whispered hints --that Hillary Clinton is "cozy" with Wall Street.  He ends with the conclusion, "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?"

The most interesting passage is where he takes a look at the biggest, most recent (and really, only specific charge) that comes from a 2004 video by then-professor Elizabeth Warren, suggesting that Ms. Clinton had changed her position on a bankruptcy bill from the time she was first against the bill when she was First Lady to when she later voted for it -- when it came up again for passage -- when she was a senator.  Drum writes --
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 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.

You can read the whole article here.  It's not particularly long.