Gore Vidal once quipped that there is only one party in the United States, “The Property Party…and it has two right wings.”
Thus is the state of the 2016 campaign over the last 96 hours. Hillary Clinton ‘relaunched‘ her campaign on Roosevelt Island over the weekend and Jeb Bush, finally, declared his candidacy. While these two media-anointed front runners belong to different political parties, they are actually pretty close on the political spectrum.
Journalists and political commentators around the web have been noticing this relative closeness of politics between the two. Here are some of the best tidbits:
—From David Catanese at U.S. News on Immigration, Education, Intervention, and Marijuana.
- [Bush and Clinton] are inclined to pursue some type of comprehensive immigration reform, which would protect millions of workers in the U.S. without legal status.
- Both are supportive of Common Core, with Bush long backing the education standards castigated by conservatives and Clinton calling the partisan arguments surrounding them “unfortunate.”
- Both are seen as interventionists internationally, with an instinct to use military and diplomatic power aggressively. [See Clinton and Bush’s response to Vladimir Putin]
- They’ve even separately but similarly invoked the states’ rights argument regarding the legalization of marijuana—while they don’t personally support the drug, they’re open to states determining laws on it.
—David Rufful at YoungCons chronicles their positions on Obamacare and NSA Spying:
- While Bush has said Obamacare is “flawed to its core” and “doesn’t work,” he sat on the board of directors of a company that not only supported, but actively and aggressively promoted Obamacare. The name of that company is Tenet Health Care and they supported the law because it would be profitable for the company if millions of Americans were forced to sign up. What does Jeb have to say for himself? Does he even support a full repeal of the law? [Clinton has endorsed Obamacare many times and even pledged to fix some of its “glitches”.]
- Bush said “there’s not a shred of evidence” that anybody’s civil liberties have been violated by the NSA. He argued that collection of U.S. phone call data is “hugely important” to protecting Americans from terrorism. Meanwhile, a U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit found the collection of “metadata” from Americans’ phone calls is illegal and not the original intention of Congress in passing the Patriot Act. [Clinton has been evasive on NSA spying, using the ‘better balance‘ line to justify metadata collection.]
Truthstream Media’s Aaron and Melissa Dykes darkly connect Clinton and Bush’s connection to Wall Street and Fracking:
- “The Council on Foreign Relations and Goldman Sachs come into play nicely for 2016, incidentally, as a fresh report from the CFR, North America: Time for a New Focus calls for the next president to pursue an “integrated” North America based around open borders, immigration amnesty and a new energy paradigm consisting of mucho fracking for shale gas [and] a completed XL Keystone pipeline and a continent-wide electricity grid connecting the U.S. with its neighbors in Mexico and Canada [which Hillary and Jeb support]. The report’s co-chair, Robert Zoellick (today senior advisor to Goldman Sachs International and yesterday George W. Bush’s World Bank head) stated bluntly ‘I hope that this report will provide an agenda for both [U.S. political] parties in the presidential elections in 2016.’…Both the Bush and Clinton families have brought us into the North American Union, with the elder Bush helping to bring NAFTA into the main, Bill Clinton signing NAFTA into law, George W. Bush signing the secretive Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America in 2006, Jeb Bush writing immigration reform policies for the CFR, Hillary promoting the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Wal-mart and globalization at large, and other events in between.”
What isn’t mentioned above is, of course, the dynastic appeal and oodles of money buoying Clinton and Bush’s campaign. Perhaps that is why many, including personalities like Rush Limbaugh, believe Hillary and Jeb should run on the same ticket, because voters “wouldn’t know the difference.”
Source: Hillary Clinton = Jeb Bush? – Gabriel Debenedetti and Annie Karni
