David Nir, front page poster extraordinaire, suggested earlier today that Karl Rove’s super PAC, American Crossroads, was running a negative ad in Iowa about Hillary Clinton in order to bolster the candidacy of Bernie Sanders. Nir suggested that Rove and the GOP are angling to help make Sanders the Democratic nominee. The American Crossroads ad highlights Clinton’s money-making from firms connected to Wall Street.
David wrote:
Karl Rove didn’t suddenly become a rabid critic of Wall Street’s influence, just like the RNC didn’t just turn into overnight Bernie fans. The truth of the matter is a lot simpler: They’d prefer to see Sanders win the Democratic nomination because they think he’d be easier to beat in November.
No, David, the truth of the matter is a lot simpler than your claim of GOP “ratfucking” (as I noted in a comment in that diary):
Rove and Crossroads are testing out a line of attack that they plan to use against Clinton in November should she be the nominee, which I am sure they believe (as Nate Silver does) to be the highly likely outcome.
That’s the Occam’s razor explanation for why Rove and Crossroads are testing this attack on Clinton in Iowa now.
In a year when Trump’s racist populism leads the Republican field, attacking Clinton from the left on her close ties to Wall Street may be a surprisingly effective tool for the GOP. And this attack may be particularly powerful against Clinton, given her upside-down favorables and high untrustworthy ratings among independents.
Don’t believe me? Read this:
In Race Defined by Income Gap, Hillary Clinton’s Wall Street Ties Incite Rivals
...
But her paid speeches are now emerging as the central line of attack in an increasingly bitter primary clash with Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
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“You got to be really, really, really good to get $250,000 for a speech,” he (Sanders) said.
The attacks have become one of Mr. Sanders’s biggest applause lines in Iowa, where the median household earns about $52,229 a year. And Republican strategists are testing how to turn Mrs. Clinton’s speaking fees against her in an election defined by rising economic inequality and stagnant middle-class wages.
Rove and Crossroads recognize a weakness...
But the new attacks strike at what even some allies believe may be one Mrs. Clinton’s biggest vulnerabilities: not her positions on financial regulation, but her personal relationships with Wall Street executives, along with the millions of dollars Mrs. Clinton, her husband, and their family foundation have accepted in speaking fees or charitable contributions from banks, hedge funds and asset managers.
How much money are we talking about?
Together, Mrs. Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, have earned in excess of $125 million in speech income since leaving the White House, one-fifth of it in the last two years.
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Goldman Sachs alone paid Mrs. Clinton $675,000 for three speeches in three different states, a fact Mr. Sanders has highlighted repeatedly.
Yeah, I’d call that a “vulnerability.”
So while David Nir argued that Rove and Crossroads were running the ads in Iowa out of fear of Clinton, the truth is just the opposite: she is extremely vulnerable to this line of attack in a year when middle- and lower-income Americans feel like the game is rigged against them. Rove and company have been busy testing these themes in focus groups for months:
But a Crossroads official said that its polls and focus groups of voters in battleground states suggested that Mrs. Clinton’s speaking fee — typically around $225,000, or almost five times the median American household income — could be a potent line of attack with swing voters in November.
One poll, from June, found that when informed that the Clintons had made $25 million in speaking fees since the beginning of 2014, slightly more than half of respondents said she “does not understand” the “struggles of ordinary Americans.”Another poll, from November, found that Wall Street campaign contributions to Mrs. Clinton made a similar proportion of voters less likely to vote for her.
And guess which voters are most vulnerable to this sort of messaging, according to Crossroads? Hillary’s claimed bulwark:
“Our focus groups with swing and independent voters, especially women, responded very negatively to the contrast between Hillary’s rhetoric on Wall Street and her close financial ties to the industry,” said Steven J. Law, the president of American Crossroads.
So, no, David, Karl Rove and his conservative cohorts aren’t trying to help Sanders. I highly doubt they believe he even has a shot at the nomination. They are going after Clinton on an Achilles’ heel: her big-money relationship with Wall Street.