Hillary Clinton’s Goldman Sachs Speech Problem

WaPo.com:

In a Thursday op-ed headlined "Mrs. Clinton, Show Voters Those Transcripts," the New York Times editorial board gets to the heart of why Hillary Clinton's insistence that she will release her paid speech transcripts when everyone else in the race does makes no sense.
They write:

On Tuesday, Mrs. Clinton further complained, “Why is there one standard for me, and not for everybody else?”

The only different standard here is the one Mrs. Clinton set for herself, by personally earning $11 million in 2014 and the first quarter of 2015 for 51 speeches to banks and other groups and industries ...

... Her conditioning her releases on what the Republicans might or might not do is mystifying. Republicans make no bones about their commitment to Wall Street deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. Mrs. Clinton is laboring to convince struggling Americans that she will rein in big banks, despite taking their money.

Yes, yes yes.  Also, yes.

Clinton — as the Times piece helpfully notes — has run through a series of bad answers about why she gave the speeches and why she is now unwilling to authorize the release of the transcripts of them.  She has migrated from some sort of convoluted citing of Sept. 11, 2001 and her work as New York's senator to justify her speech-giving on Wall Street to her current position, which amounts to "I won't do it unless everyone else does it."

The problem inherent in that point is that everyone else doesn't do it.  No one else in this race has earned millions of dollars from speeches to Wall Street banks and investment firms. No one else was paid $675,000 for a series of speeches to Goldman Sachs. And, no one else in the race is trying to make the case that despite their financial ties to Wall Street that they are best positioned to hold that industry accountable for its practices.

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