Tuesday, May 06, 2008

Over the Line

Hillary’s Wall Street bashing is a giant cheap shot and a big disappointment from the junior senator from New York. After all, Wall Street is the heart of the New York economy. It supplies an enormous volume of tax collections to finance city and state experiments in socialism and welfarism. Incidentally, it’s kind of hard to buy into Hillary’s populist shtick, given the fact that she and her husband pocketed over $100 million of income in recent years.

Nobody can quite figure out whether she referred to Wall Street as a bunch of “money-grubbers” or “money brokers” the other night. The Hillary campaign insists it was the latter, but observers at the Indiana event are not so sure. So while there’s a part of me that thinks Hillary’s gas tax cut is a good political idea, her Wall Street bashing is over the line.

There’s a good chance she is going to be very disappointed by tonight’s election results, especially in North Carolina. As National Review's Byron York and Rich Lowry have written, Hillary has worked hard to Bubbify her campaign message to the working middle class, targeting folks who are bitterly disappointed at economic events and — as Obama claimed — are clinging to God and guns. The original Bubba himself has been out rallying voters in the rural precincts of North Carolina on a 24/7 basis.

But this morning’s Drudge Report shows a Zogby poll with Hillary going down by 14 points in North Carolina, and winning Indiana by only a couple. If Zogby is correct, she’s going to be very close to the end after tonight’s results. It’s doubtful that she’ll drop out, but she needs better numbers in both states for sure.