Now It's the Vast Elite Conspiracy

That Hillary Clinton is some smart girl. It was she, ten years ago, who fearlessly deployed her super-sniffer conspiracy detector during the Clinton impeachment scandal. She found nothing less than a “Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy” determined to drive her husband out of office.

When you work hard at something, you get to be pretty good at it. This last month, according to David Brooks, Sen. Clinton has discovered a vast elite conspiracy. This cabal of naysayers have conspired to pour scorn on her proposal to enact a gas tax holiday. On ABC’s This Week,

[Host George] Stephanopoulos asked her to name a single economist who thinks a tax-holiday plan would work, and the daughter of Wellesley and Yale took the chance to shove the geeks into their lockers: "I’m not going to put my lot in with economists."

David Brooks had to admit a certain admiration for Sen. Clinton’s brazen conversion to the practice of populist demogoguery.

This wasn’t just shameless spin, it was shamelessness with a purpose. Clinton signaled that she wasn’t going to concede even an inch to the vast elitist conspiracy. She wasn’t going to feel guilty about ignoring the evidence. She was going to stomp on it, flay it and leave it a twisted mass of jelly quivering on the ground. She was going to perform the primordial duty of an alpha dog leader ’” helping one’s own.

Thus all of a sudden the most liberal member of the United States Senate, Sen. Obama, gets to look like a moderate. While Clinton believes in raw power, Obama gets to look like a politician who believe in the power of communication.

They are imperfect messengers for their creeds. Clinton rails against “Wall Street money-grubbers,” but her policies are often drawn from the Wall Street wing of the party. Obama talks about postpartisan compromise in the abstract, but rarely in the particular.

The problem is that America’s problem is not a lack of raw power or a lack of communication. It is an excess of raw government and its obsession with power and the appeasement of powerful and/or vocal interests.

Don’t look to Sen. Clinton or to Sen. Obama if you want a solution to that problem. Not that either of them could possibly be called an elitist.