Hillary opens the Overton Window.

• Author: Glastris, Paul
• Position: Editor's Note

One evening in early October, my wife and I were in the kitchen, half-listening to MSNBC, when I suddenly found myself riveted to the screen. There was Hillary Clinton, in a speech given earlier that day in Toledo, linking Donald Trump's tax code manipulations and other examples of corporate abuse--big banks creating phony customer accounts, Big Pharma jacking up drug prices--to a broader critique of growing corporate monopoly power. That power, Clinton said, "threatens business of all sizes, as well as consumers. With less competition, corporations can use their power to raise prices, limit choice for consumers, cut wages for workers, crowd out start-ups and small businesses.... As president, I will appoint tough, independent authorities to strengthen antitrust enforcement and really scrutinize mergers and acquisitions, so the big don't keep getting bigger and bigger."

My first reaction was to give my wife a fist bump. As longtime readers of the Washington Monthly know, we've been hammering away at the issue of market concentration and the need for stronger federal competition policies for more than fifteen years. Finally, our white-whale-like issue has made it to the forefront of the national political debate.

My second reaction was to think, Why did Clinton wait until five weeks before the election to bring this up? In a campaign that is supposedly all about the economy, inequality, and populist anger, isn't an idea as big as going after corporate monopolies something to build your economic message around from the beginning, rather than tossing it out, almost as an afterthought, at the end?

But then my third reaction was, Don't go blaming Hillary. At least she is talking about the issue. None of the other 2016 presidential candidates did. Not Bernie Sanders, who had much to say about breaking up the big banks but never suggested expanding that idea to other sectors of the economy that are in many cases more monopolized than banking. Not the two short-lived Democratic contenders, Martin O'Malley and Jim Webb--and Lord knows those two could have used an idea to make them stand out. And certainly not any of the seventeen GOP hopefuls, including the eventual nominee, Donald Trump.

The failure of the antitrust issue to garner any serious political attention until the end of the campaign is an object lesson in the difficulty of opening the Overton Window--academese for the range of ideas deemed politically respectable enough to consider...