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Clinton Camp Expands Strategic Umbrella Of Stupidity In Their Global War On Economists
UPDATE: Sen. Mendenez has released the following clarification:
"I should have elaborated more in my on-air response -- the point I was making was that the everyday pains that average Americans are feeling aren't always taken into account by an economist sitting behind a desk looking at numbers. Of course economists are important to public policy, but I was trying to point out that they aren't the only voices that matter. Cold macroeconomic calculus can glaze over the realities of human suffering, so there needs to be a balance between crunching numbers and understanding the everyday experiences of Americans in order to make good public policy."
Apparently, the singular lesson that Senator Hillary Clinton has learned from her much touted "35 years of experience" is that having a lot of experience doesn't count for jack. That's the only possible takeaway from her bitter and clingy support for a "gas tax holiday" - an idea so lacking in merit that it has required her campaign to wage a full-scale jihad against anybody who knows anything about anything other than maybe the topic of "Shots of Crown Royal make my belly say YUMMM!"
Clinton's battle against People Who Had The Traitorous Gall To Learn Things And Later Apply That Knowledge To The Real World has expanded to campaign surrogates. On this morning's Morning Joe, New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez helped to advance the cause of creepy anti-intellectualism:
BRZEZINSKI: Just tell me one economist that supports this.
MENENDEZ: You know, thank God that we don't have economists making necessarily public policy, because they don't really feel the pains of average Americans.
[WATCH.]
Really? I seem to recall that a top-flight economist named Joe Stiglitz helped Bill Clinton's administration formulate public policy, and from what I'm told, he did just fine. Stiglitz, of course, opposes the gas tax holiday, making him a model of the sort of common sense and consistency one needs to not further exacerbate the "pains of average Americans" with bad economic policies.
And, truly, in the clearest sign yet that the "gas tax holiday" is a horrible mistake, it has received the endorsement of Bill Kristol.
[WATCH.]
KRISTOL: The gas tax is I think an interesting issue. You know, the entire liberal establishment is against Senator Clinton and Senator McCain and their proposal to have a summer holiday on the gas tax. Clinton has taken on the issue. I sort of admire her for this. She has not backed up at all. She has challenged elite liberal economists. She has an ad up now in North Carolina and Indiana asking why Obama doesn't want to give consumers a little bit of a break. I actually think that she has a pretty good argument on this, that the entire establishment disagrees. If she could win taking on the entire conventional liberal establishment on an issue like this, with a populist middle-class appeal, I think that would be interesting and would say something about where the Democratic primary electorate is as opposed to where the elite opinion pages of the newspapers are.
Naturally, Kristol's contention that the "liberal establishment" is against the "gas tax holiday" fails to account for the fact that economists on both sides of the aisle are against it. As in, all of them. And you hardly need to be "elite" to be against it - students that fail to grasp the elementary nature of supply and demand rarely matriculate from ECON 101 to the exciting sequel, ECON 102.
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May 6, 2008 12:58 PM