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Last Night’s Democratic Debate: Clinton and Wall Street

Clinton said, “I think it’s fair to really ask what’s behind that comment”.

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One e-mail chain shows event organizers originally wanted Hillary Clinton to give that speech.

Clinton went on to say that she accepted the Goldman money after she left the State Department in 2013, when, as she put it “I wasn’t committed to running” for president.

“She said she’ll look into it”, Podesta said defensively, his voice nearly cracking.

Chelsea Clinton spoke at the UMKC in February 2014. Last month, she laughed and turned away when a reporter specifically asked for transcripts of her speeches to Goldman Sachs.

And yet the evening also featured one of the most self-reflective moments I’ve seen on the campaign trail, not only from Clinton but from any politician.

She continued to say that, “anybody who knows me, who thinks that they can influence me – name anything they’ve influenced me on”.

Perhaps we are. Thankfully, I found a solution: Why doesn’t Hillary just post transcripts of her Wall Street-firm speeches and prove all of the evil people involved in this vast right-wing conspiracy wrong?

“I am a progressive who gets things done”, Clinton added, before wondering aloud how Sanders came to be a progressive “gatekeeper”. “I probably described more times than I can remember how stressful it was advising the president about going after [Osama] Bin Laden”. “You know when I was Secretary of State, several times I said, ‘You know”. But Clinton’s critics have attempted to use the speaking fees to highlight the former secretary of state’s cozy relationship with Wall Street. “And I’m going to go right after that!” “Some of the people you know, conservative talkers, are getting paid $50,000 to go out and speak in places”, Reagan said.

“I’m not going to let that bother me”.

It’s possible, of course, that there might be snippets of Clinton’s speeches that could be cited in the support of the idea that she is too “cozy” with Wall Street, which Sanders characterized in the debate as essentially a criminal enterprise.

Clinton claimed that according to Sanders’s definition of progressive, hardly any current Democrats would fit the bill, including President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and many liberal Senators in Congress. She boxed Sanders into a corner when she pointedly asked him whether he believed Obama was a progressive.

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All of that said, Clinton often acts in illogical ways, creating needless controversy because of her own paranoia, resentment and secrecy for secrecy sake. He argues that Clinton’s anti-Wall Street rhetoric is hypocritical, considering the fact that the financial sector contributes heavily to her campaign.

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