What Clinton could learn from O'Malley on banking

Democratic presidential candidate Martin O’Malley, currently polling in the low nothings, needs attention. He wants to be the lefty alternative to Hillary Clinton, but the leftier Bernie Sanders has been stealing his thunder. Unfortunately, when O’Malley unveiled an aggressive Wall Street-bashing financial reform plan on Thursday, the initial attention focused on the plan’s first footnote, which cited a bogus story from a satirical website about former Attorney General Eric Holder taking a $77 million-a-year job at JP Morgan Chase. Clearly, O’Malley’s research staff is not too big to fail.

But beyond the unforced error, O’Malley’s plan—along with the antagonistic “open letter” to Wall Street megabanks that accompanied it—deserves some attention. It echoes much of the wrongheaded analysis and ideas we’ve been hearing from Sanders, but behind the fiery break-up-the-banks rhetoric and blustery throw-the-bad-guys-in-jail posturing, some of its most significant proposals are relatively thoughtful. Its pros and cons also suggest a potential path for Clinton, a way she can appeal to her party’s populist yearning without embracing policy demagoguery or ignoring the Obama administration’s progress on reform.

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