Being Bill Clinton

(Cross-posted from Salon)
As usual, Matt Stoller cuts usefully to the chase. There's so much here that I almost don't know where to begin. Let's start with the title: "Bill Clinton's no liberal hero." The point? "The press, party leaders and voters at large have completely hidden the actual stakes in [this] election. Bill Clinton can star in a television commercial bashing the deregulation of Wall Street, and then immediately collect cash from Wall Street firms whose industry he deregulated." Exhibits A and B? "Clinton has in fact done phenomenally well from the financial services industry in his post-presidential career. He received $125,000 in cash apiece from Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse just two months after signing the bill deregulating derivatives. His speaking arrangements, a well-known conduit to funnel cash to retired politicians, has garnered him over $80 million since 2001, a substantial amount of which has come from the financial services industry he helped." If Big Journalism hadn't been fully captured by Big Politics, we wouldn't need Stoller to remind us of all this a few weeks before the election.