The biggest story in politics is the web of interests surrounding the Clintons and their charities. From foreign governments to corporations, a steady stream of cash made its way to them, sometimes from parties with business pending before Hillary Clinton’s State Department.
But if this story is to remain relevant into 2016, Clinton’s opponents will have to link it to a broader message about their competing visions for the country. What could that be? Try the stand against crony capitalism a couple of GOP long shots are taking.
Start with a once and perhaps future candidate, Rick Perry. The former governor of Texas took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal this week to explain why he now supports shutting down the Export-Import Bank.
Companies such as Atlanta’s Delta Air Lines argue Ex-Im’s loans to foreign companies buying U.S. products amount to subsidies that favor airlines based overseas. Many congressional Republicans support shutting down, or drastically shrinking, Ex-Im to stop distorting the market.
In his op-ed, Perry explains why shutting down Ex-Im would also strengthen the case for other longtime GOP objectives:
“We won’t have the moral credibility to reduce corporate taxes if we continue to subsidize corporate exports for corporations that already enjoy low effective tax rates, like General Electric and Boeing,” he wrote. “We won’t have the moral credibility to reform government programs that benefit future retirees if we don’t first reform government programs that benefit big businesses like Caterpillar. We won’t be able to give businesses more regulatory latitude if we continue to operate a government bank with an emerging record of corporate corruption.”
That’s a good case against Ex-Im’s crony capitalism. But while Clinton will probably argue for other policies — she’s already said she disagrees with closing the bank — it isn’t a link to her alleged cronyism.
Enter Carly Fiorina, a former technology executive who joined the GOP field this week. At a National Review Institute event last weekend, Fiorina criticized the same kind of backroom dealings and favor-trading the Clintons are accused of. She called them a natural feature of a too-big government.
“The dirty little secret of … Obamacare or Dodd-Frank or all of these other huge complicated pieces of regulation or legislation,” she said, “is that they don’t get written on their own. They get written in part by lobbyists for big companies who want to understand that the rules are going to work for them.”
That’s a populist approach to traditional Republican arguments that Mitt Romney never quite pulled off. But Fiorina had her sights trained instead on Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a left-wing populist.
“She claims that the way to solve crony capitalism is more complexity, more regulations, more legislation, worse tax codes,” Fiorina said, “and of course the more complicated government gets and it’s really complicated now, the less the small and the powerless can deal with it.”
As Clinton increasingly channels Warren to woo disenchanted progressives, that kind of argument ought to stick against her, too — for whoever survives the GOP primary to make it.
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