The Clintons Turned the Democratic Party Over to Donors. Can It Recover?

By Jill Abramson, Guardian UK

23 December 16

While the pundit class all said the Republican party was being torn apart by this election, it is the Democratic party that is in tatters. Now it must be rebuilt

illary Clinton chose a bitterly ironic party location to thank her massive donor network last week: the grand ballroom of The Plaza, once owned by Donald Trump.

The people gathered for the glum get-together, including hedge fund managers and media titans, had built the most formidable fundraising network ever seen in American politics. They pumped more than $4bn into various Clinton campaigns and related political and charitable groups over four decades. Many of them have been cutting huge checks since Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign in 1992.

In 2016, they expected their $1.2bn infusion to catapult Hillary Clinton back into the White House and were astonished, like the rest of the country’s elite, to see all that money go down the tubes.

I was not invited to the Plaza. (As usual for Clinton, press was banned). But the Plaza gathering was a personal milestone for me, too, and the coda to a long career reporting on Clinton Inc.

Back in 1991, I was one of the only reporters with Bill Clinton at one of his early Hollywood shakedowns. I saw how he loved schmoozing with rich people, how his body language literally changed as he mixed with the ultra-rich. We were in the Beverly Hills mansion of movie producer Mike Medavoy, whose home actually had a chandelier hanging in the outdoor patio.

I was told later by campaign aides that Hillary Clinton had particularly hated the piece I wrote, on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, pointing out how the couple stitched every station of their lives, from Yale Law School to the once-famous Renaissance Weekends they attended on New Year’s Eve, into a fundraising juggernaut. She said the story made them look like “we were using our friends”.

But Bill and Hillary Clinton are the people responsible for turning the Democratic party into the party of Wall Street and their glitzy friends. During his time in office, Bill Clinton did little to change a campaign finance system that has always been fundamentally at odds with the party’s egalitarian message.

The likes of Anna Wintour and hedge fund titan R Donald Sussman, are certainly part of the reason why so much of middle America turned against the Democrats in this election. (Though Trump, meanwhile, has surrounded himself with billionaires, including three Goldman Sachs alums.)

Still, if not with the Plaza crowd, where will the Democratic party go?

While all eyes are focused on Trump, this is one of the most pressing questions in American politics. While the pundit class all said the Republican party was being torn apart by this election, it is the Democratic party that is in tatters. It has to be rebuilt from the ground up for the new, post-Clinton future. But the foundation for such a massive undertaking is shaky.

It isn’t just that Democrats are the minority party in Washington, it’s that they’ve lost state governments at all levels, from governorships to the state legislatures. While the Democrats have focused on gaining and holding the White House since 2008, the Koch brothers and their billionaire, rightwing allies have been showering money on local candidates, too, and the payoff has been huge.

One has only to look at the fracas in North Carolina, where the outgoing Republican governor and his Republican legislature are undermining the powers of the new governor, to see how effective the Koch network has been.

State governors, like Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, have always been where the parties go looking for new talent but with so few blue states, the pickings are slim for the Democrats. The only real bright spot for them are the mayors of big cities, where their party is in control. But even there, big-city problems are tarnishing potential younger stars like Rahm Emmanuel of Chicago and Bill de Blasio of New York.

But talent is not even the party’s biggest problem. It is the ideas that animate the party. Somehow, Trump’s promise to “Make America Great Again” managed to win over the Republican coalition of religious conservatives, non-college-educated whites and suburban voters needed to win the electoral college.

Hillary Clinton did not have a cogent economic message. This was the most serious failing of her campaign. It is also the biggest challenge facing the Democratic party as it tries to rebuild with an alliance of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren liberals and the financiers who have funded the party since Bill Clinton’s victory in 1992.

Of course, the Sanders-Warren economic message is at war with Wall Street interests. So who owns the economic ideas that must rejuvenate the Democrats as Trump and his new cabinet try to rip apart the social programs that are the signature accomplishments of Democratic presidents from Johnson to Obama?

How will the Democrats approach trade, another issue that deeply divides Wall Street donors from the Democratic rank and file. Perhaps most important, who are the best thinkers and activists who can begin to answer these questions?

Everyone I have talked to in the party is still too stunned and angry over Trump’s upset win to really get their heads around the daunting work ahead. Democrats are still obsessed with Russian interference in the election and with blaming the FBI director, James Comey, for defeating Clinton. These, too, are important subjects, but don’t help shape the future.

In politics, as in life, Democrats should take comfort in the fact that there can always be sharp and surprising reversals of fortune. On 2 November 1992, Donald Trump lost control of his cherished Plaza Hotel and had to file for bankruptcy. The very next day, Bill Clinton was elected president.