1115.org

This hilarious Clinton lady is determined to win at all costs, to win something, anything. What she’s winning very handsomely right now is what you usually win with that attitude: the race to the bottom.

On Thursday, campaign spokesman Howard Wolfson announced that the Clinton campaign had decided — carefully, deliberately, with full knowledge of what they were doing — to sink to a new low. In their passionate embrace of the throughly misguided gas tax holiday proposal, and their desperate need to sell it to voters in upcoming primaries — and that’s all this is about, obviously — they were willing to adopt the quintessentially Republican propensity to blithely dismiss scientific evidence and expert opinion as irrelevant or questionable or both.

Hillary Clinton obviously decided that this new front in her battle against all that is fitting and proper was too important to be left to spokesmen and aides.

On Thursday, there she was in the trenches, borrowing George Bush’s dishonest rhetoric, demanding that people “stand and … tell us, are they with us or against us when it comes to taking on the oil companies.

And on Sunday morning she pressed Wolfson’s theme herself on ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos” :

STEPHANOPOULOS: Economists say that’s not going to happen. They say this is going to go straight into the profits of the oil companies. They’re not going to actually lower their prices. And the two top leaders in the House are against it. Nearly every editorial board and economist in the country has come out against it. Even a supporter of yours, Paul Krugman of The New York Times, calls it pointless and disappointing.

Can you name one economist, a credible economist who supports the suspension?

CLINTON: Well, you know, George, I think we’ve been for the last seven years seeing a tremendous amount of government power and elite opinion basically behind policies that haven’t worked well for the middle class and hard-working Americans. From the moment I started this campaign, I’ve said that I am absolutely determined that we’re going to reverse the trends that have been going on in our government and in our political system, because what I have seen is that the rich have gotten richer. A vast majority — I think something like 90 percent — of the wealth gains over the last seven years have gone to the top 10 percent of wage earners in America.

Not just dodging the question, but dismissing credible economists as “elite opinion”? Straight from the Republican playbook, isn’t that? Just in case the point hadn’t got across, she came back and repeated the phrase, once again painting credible economists as anti-middle-class:

We’ve got to get out of this mindset where somehow elite opinion is always on the side of doing things that really disadvantage the vast majority of Americans, and get back at looking hard at what we’re going to do to stop the housing crisis.

(That’s not just a thoroughly stupid statement, it’s actually crazy. The spontaneous response to that kind of crap has to be: WTF?)

The funny thing is that a voter actually called bullsh*t on Hillary, right to her face, over her “elite opinion” garbage:

VOTER QUESTION: I have — Sen. Clinton, I actually make less than $25,000 a year, so talking about gas prices is not academic for me. I really do feel pain at the pump.

However, I do feel pandered to when you talk about suspending the gas tax. I don’t think that it’s really a reasonable plan, and call me crazy, but I actually listen to economists, because I think that they know what they studied.

The other thing that I find really funny is how Hillary has decided to make the gas tax holiday the central front in her battle on Obama. Let’s hope the voters of Indiana and North Carolina have the sense to send Hillary a strong message that they will not be pandered to by this kind of ox-crap.

*** Update, 7:45 am ***

A new NYT/CBS poll suggests that voters deserve far more credit than Hillary Clinton seems prepared to give them:

As for the “gas-tax holiday” being promoted by McCain and Clinton… (a) 49% plurality of all voters said the proposal is a bad idea, and among Dems, a 52% majority rejects the proposal. Similarly, a whopping 70% majority of voters overall said candidates pushing the idea were doing so to score political points, not because they think it’s a good policy.