Hillary: 'Everybody Should' Love Me

Hillary Clinton said everybody should like her, so why shouldn’t big business?

During Saturday night’s New Hampshire debate, the Democratic presidential front-runner was asked about her 2008 campaign — specifically, a Fortune cover that declared “Business Love Hillary.”

“Eight years later, should corporate America love Hillary Clinton?” asked the ABC moderator.

“Everybody should,” Clinton declared, provoking laughter and applause from the audience.

“Look, I have said I want to be the president for the struggling, the striving and the successful. I want to make sure the wealthy pay their fair share, which they have not been doing. I want the Buffett Rule to be in effect, where millionaires have to pay 30 percent tax rates instead of 10 percent to nothing in some cases. I want to make sure we rein in the excessive use of political power to feather the nest and support the super-wealthy,” she said.

“But I also want to create jobs and I want to be a partner with the private sector. I’m particularly keen on creating jobs in small business. My dad was a small businessman, a really small business. I want to do more to help incentivize and create more small businesses. So if — if people who are in the private sector know what I stand for, it’s what I fought for as a senator, it’s what I will do as president, and they want to be part of once again building our economy so it works for everybody, more power to them, because they are the kind of business leaders who understand that if we don’t get the American economy moving and growing, we’re not going to recognize our country and we’re not going to give our kids the same opportunities that we had.”

Clinton’s top 10 cumulative donors between 1999 and 2016 were Citigroup ($782,327), Goldman Sachs ($711,490), DLA Piper ($628,030), JPMorgan Chase ($620,919), EMILY’s List ($605,174) Morgan Stanley ($543,065), Time Warner ($411,296), Skadden Arps ($406,640), Lehman Brothers ($362,853) and Cablevision Systems ($336,288), according to a Politifact analysis.

This question gave an opportunity for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to jump in.

“So Hillary and I have a difference. The CEOs of large multinationals may like Hillary. They ain’t going to like me and Wall Street is going to like me even less,” Sanders proclaimed.

“And the reason for that is we’ve got to deal with the elephant in the room, which is the greed, recklessness and illegal behavior on Wall Street,” he said. “When you have six financial institutions in this country that issue two-thirds of the credit cards and one-third of the mortgages, when three out of four of them are larger today than when we bailed them out because they are too big to fail, we’ve got to re-establish Glass-Steagall, we have got to break the large financial institutions up.”

“…Having said that, I don’t think I’m going to get a whole lot of campaign contributions from Wall Street. I don’t have a super PAC. I don’t want campaign contributions from corporate America. And let me be clear: While there are some great corporations creating jobs and trying to do the right thing, in my view — and I say this very seriously — the greed of the billionaire class, the greed of Wall Street is destroying this economy and is destroying the lives of millions of Americans.”