Campaign For America’s Future has an excellent article Hillary Clinton’s Economic Story: Stuff Happens. Normally, I don’t like to quote too extensively from an article because I would rather you read the original to give the authors the clicks that they deserve. In this case, the message is so important, that I cannot take the chance you won’t read the original. There is still more to be read in the original than I am quoting here, as the ellipses indicate.

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A framing speech can’t and shouldn’t go into policy details, and Clinton pledged a series of speeches would fill in the missing text. But a framing speech should tell a clear story: about how we got in the hole we are in, who drove us there, how do we get out, and what leaders and movements will lead the way.

Here, Clinton’s speech was disappointing. The problem, she argued, is most Americans see “an economy that still isn’t delivering for them… It still seems, to most Americans that I have spoken with, that it is stacked for those at the top.” The “basic bargain” – work hard and get ahead – “has been eroded.” Note the passive voice.
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We have been victimized by inexorable economic forces – technology, global trade. Better ideas and policy can fix it. Completely absent from the frame is any sense of the systematic war waged by corporations and the right wing to win the battle of ideas, flood money into our politics and rig the rules of the economy to their benefit. They rigged monetary policy and fiscal policy, global trade rules, labor and wage laws, government investment, deregulation, privatization, global policing – all reinforcing the effort to weaken workers, drive down wages, and capture more of the profits at the top. And then they invested a minute portion of those profits to buy both parties and corrupt our democracy.
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Omitting the reality that our policies have been systematically and purposefully rigged to favor the few – and that our politics have been corrupted in that pursuit – both misleads Americans, and weakens that agenda’s appeal.
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Progressives are winning the economic argument among Democrats. As Clinton shows, the era of small government is over. Every Democratic candidate summons us to a new era of activist government. But the question of this populist moment is who will speak truth not to power, but to the American people. Clinton is calling people to a policy discussion. Sanders is rousing them for a political revolution. She’s one of the best qualified candidates in the history of the Republic and an overwhelming favorite to win the nomination. But he is telling a far clearer story of why working people are struggling in this wealthy country and what they must do to take it back.

This article does a much better job of explaining exactly what is missing from Clinton’s speech than my previous post about the article Clinton’s Speech on “The Economy”: Where’s the Beef?. The two articles identify many of the same issues. The current article has more details where they are needed and fewer details where they are not needed.