Former President Bill Clinton weighed in Wednesday on two hot button topics — the Goldman Sachs controversy and the Arizona immigration law — with some outside the box thinking and deft political messaging.
Goldman may not be guilty of wrongdoing, Clinton said. On immigration, he expressed his famous empathy for the plight of Americans in border states.
Hours after the former president spoke, President Obama said much the same thing as Clinton on both topics.
Obama, speaking to reporters on Air Force One coming back to Washington from Illinois, indicated that Goldman Sachs traders may not have broken the law in a trade that is at issue in a civil suit being brought by the federal government.
Asked about the Goldman case, Obama said he didn’t want to comment on an ongoing suit, but said “even if it’s legal,” much of the activity on Wall Street “doesn’t seem to serve much of an economic purpose.”
That sounded similar — if a bit more equivocating — than Clinton’s remarks earlier in the day in Washington.
“I’m not at all sure they violated the law,” Clinton said of Goldman at a fiscal summit in Washington hosted by the Peter G. Peterson Institute, later adding it was “not self-evident” that Goldman did anything wrong.
Clinton, however, also questioned the value of much derivatives trading, stating that “too much of this stuff has no economic purpose no matter who wins or loses.”
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