Pence may want to re-think this laugh line

Mike Pence was about halfway through his stump speech at the Henderson Convention Center on Wednesday when he got to the part about how Hillary Clinton says she plans to pay for her agenda.

Quoting Clinton, Pence said the Democratic nominee pledged to go where the money is: the super-wealthy, corporations and Wall Street.

“Well, I mean, she knows where all that is,” Pence said, to knowing laughter. “She voted for the Wall Street bailout. I helped lead the fight against it on Capitol Hill.”

And that’s how the Republican Party’s candidate for vice president came to assail the Democratic nominee for being too close to Wall Street and corporations.

If that seems like a familiar attack line, it’s because that’s the same charge that Bernie Sanders levied against Clinton in the Democratic primary. That’s democratic socialist Bernie Sanders, for those who may have forgotten.

Now, Clinton may have a perfectly reasonable reply — that had she not voted to bail out the big banks, the recession would have been longer, deeper and wider. Pence may, in that sense, have benefited from the fact that Clinton was willing to grant relief to her constituents on Wall Street with the proceeds from taxes paid by her constituents on Main Street.

Clinton, however, cannot defend herself by saying the denizens of Wall Street are unknown to her, or even that they are her enemies. Their close relationship goes back to the original Clinton administration, when Bill Clinton signed legislation that paved the way for party time on Wall Street.

As the late Christopher Hitchens argues in his devastating 1999 anti-Clinton treatise “No One Left to Lie To,” the post-welfare reform era saw a marked increase in the income inequality that Hillary Clinton now says she’s desperate to address.

“By 1997, all economic analysts were showing an abrupt and widening gap in income distribution in the United States,” he wrote, “with many more super-rich and many more abjectly poor, and an astonishing increase in the number of ‘working poor’ who, even with tough and unrewarding jobs, are unable to earn enough to transcend officially defined poverty.”

Bill Clinton, Hitchens summed, “will be remembered as the man who used the rhetoric of the New Democrat to undo the New Deal.”

Now, Pence may find it momentarily useful to marry Clinton to Wall Street, hoping voters forget about the close relationship the Republican Party has enjoyed with the mavens of finance. (And who is Pence’s running mate again?)

But ultimately, the comparison may end up doing damage to his ticket. Consider Hitchens once more: In April 1993, Bill Clinton told a meeting of his Cabinet: “I hope you’re all aware we’re Eisenhower Republicans. We’re Eisenhower Republicans and we are fighting with Reagan Republicans.”

This leads to two important points. First, it’s understandable that people on the left have significant objections to Clintonism. But, as Hitchens notes, it’s an ongoing mystery as to why so many on the right harbor such objections.

Second, and more pragmatically, if Hillary Clinton is so inclined to make nice with the financial elite, why does that not commend her to the electorate when the GOP nominee seeks to demonstrate almost daily that he’s insubstantial?

If, in fact, Clinton knows the well-trod way to Wall Street, why shouldn’t she be handed the White House over a man whose rhetoric has inspired fears not only economic, but existential? If she really won’t wreck the economy, but would instead preside over another era that’s better for those at the top than it is for those at the bottom, if she really does represent an Eisenhower Republican approach why should anybody elect Trump and Pence?

Who but a nihilist would trade in an Eisenhower for a Trump?

Steve Sebelius is a Review-Journal political columnist. Follow him on Twitter (@SteveSebelius) or reach him at 702-387-5276 or SSebelius@reviewjournal.com.