As Hillary Clinton made her New York victory speech, she said, “To all the people who supported Sen. Sanders, I believe that there’s much more that unites us than divides us.”

That's a pretty bold claim for a candidate who ties herself to Obama's legacy at the wrists and ankles and has more in common with Republicans than progressives.

Since the rise of the Clintonian “New Democrat” almost three decades ago, the party has moved so far to the right it has little in common with the base it purports to represent.

President Obama campaigned on the promise of change, but, in many ways, his presidency — particularly in the first term — was George W. Bush lite.

The Obama administration barely even slapped the banks and financial elites responsible for the Great Recession on the wrist. Not a single Wall Street executive went to jail while, today, the very banks responsible pose just as much of a systemic risk as they did in 2008.

The Obama administration killed thousands of people, including an unknown number of civilians, with its secretive drone war. It expanded the war in Afghanistan — twice — dragged its feet on Guantánamo, backed a right-wing military coup that overthrew Honduras’ democratically elected left-wing government and dropped 23,400 bombs on six Muslim-majority countries in 2015.

The Obama administration waged a McCarthyite crackdown on whistleblowers, using the World War I-era Espionage Act to clampdown on more than all previous presidential administrations combined, while drastically expanding the surveillance state.

This is the Democratic Party Americans have grown up with in the past nearly 30 years, since the rise of the Clintonism. And, in these same decades, wages have stagnated, poverty has increased and people have become more and more dissatisfied with the way things are.

Clinton has been attempting to continue the pretense that the agenda of the Democratic establishment is the agenda of the base, but there is little that the corporate establishment has in common with the 99%.

Clinton, is even more tied to Wall Street than Obama. Her campaign prattle glosses over her connections with various rhetorical devices like, "We all agree that Wall Street can never again be allowed to threaten Main Street." She says it with gusto - as if that sort of vague platitude is some sort of policy that she can be held to. Hillary showed how much she had in common with us by taking home more money from a grateful Wall Street for just 12 speeches than most of us earn in a lifetime. By the way, how much did Wall Street donate to your foundation? Oh, you don't have one? Pity.

The social agenda issues that Democratic candidates of the Clinton/DLC/New Democrat/Third Way era have made hay with loom large in Clinton's rhetoric, but then there are the troubling facts of her history in politics. There is the fact that Clinton was against equal rights for LGBT people until she started running for the presidency.

Clinton was nowhere to be found amongst the advocates of a $15/hour minimum wage until she was suddenly, almost, for it. But, of course, she'll tell you that, "We all agree that wages are too low and inequality is too high." Too bad she has no plans to do anything about it.

Clinton was for the job-killing NAFTA - until she ran for elective office. She called the TPP, "the gold standard in trade agreements and was as CNN says, one of the leading drivers of the anti-worker TPP when Secretary of State - before she suddenly was against it, just in time for her presidential campaign.

Then there's the nasty bit of history that Black Lives Matter has brought up. Hillary T. Superpredator now wants us to be aware of systemic racism after her years of flacking to implement systemic racism as a strategy of the Democratic Party.

Is this "evolution" of Clinton's views credible, or just another iteration of what she and her advisors think is politically expedient? Given the recency of these changes in her positions, one doesn't have to be a crusty cynic to come to the conclusion that Clinton will say anything to get elected.

Then, there's her record of military madness. There's really no two ways about it. Hillary Clinton is a neocon.

Obama arguably beat Hillary Clinton in 2008 by running against her record of supporting wars:

As Mr. Obama has introduced himself in the opening weeks of his candidacy, few subjects have garnered more applause than his criticism of the war. He does not refer to the conflict as Mr. Bush’s war, which antiwar candidates in the Democratic Party did in the 2004 election, but rather is seeking to expand the circle of responsibility to those who supported the invasion.

“We continue to be in a war that should never have been authorized,” Mr. Obama told an audience in Iowa last week, making a not-so-subtle reference to Mrs. Clinton and other Democratic rivals. Two days later, at a Texas rally, he said, “I am proud of the fact that way back in 2002, I said that this war was a mistake.”

As if on cue, the crowds of Democrats cheered with gusto.

In 2008 Clinton would not admit that her support of the Iraq War was a mistake. Now, years later, in the face of strong criticisms from Bernie Sanders, she has "evolved" to the point that she admits that it was a mistake. But, that's only one of many conflicts that Clinton has promoted as a legislator and as Secretary of State:

As Secretary of State her aggressiveness and poor judgement led her to the White House where, sweeping aside the strong objections of Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, she persuaded President Obama to bomb Libya and topple its dictatorial regime.

Gates had warned about the aftermath. He was right. Libya has descended into a ghastly state of chaotic violence that has spilled into neighboring African nations, such as Mali, and that opened the way for ISIS to establish an expanding base in central Libya. Her fellow hawks in Washington are now calling for U.S. special forces to go to Libya.

Whether as Senator on the Armed Services Committee or as Secretary of State, Mrs. Clinton has never met a war or raid she didn’t like, or a redundant, wasteful weapons system she was willing to aggressively challenge. ...

So when Bernie Sanders properly chided her for having as an advisor, Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State under Richard Nixon, she bridled and tried to escape by asking Sanders to name his foreign policy advisors.

In fact, Kissinger and Clinton do have much in common about projecting the American Empire to brutal levels. Kissinger was the “butcher of Cambodia,” launching an illegal assault that destabilized that peaceful country into the Pol Pot slaughter of millions of innocents. She was the illegal “butcher of Libya,” an ongoing, unfolding tragedy whose blowbacks of “unintended consequences” are building by the week.

Clinton has even been endorsed by neocon insiders like Republican, PNAC cofounder Robert Kagan, who endorsed Clinton over Trump.

Other neocons have followed Mr. Kagan’s careful centrism and respect for Mrs. Clinton. Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, noted in The New Republic this year that “it is clear that in administration councils she was a principled voice for a strong stand on controversial issues, whether supporting the Afghan surge or the intervention in Libya.”

And the thing is, these neocons have a point. Mrs. Clinton voted for the Iraq war; supported sending arms to Syrian rebels; likened Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, to Adolf Hitler; wholeheartedly backs Israel; and stresses the importance of promoting democracy.

It’s easy to imagine Mrs. Clinton’s making room for the neocons in her administration. No one could charge her with being weak on national security with the likes of Robert Kagan on board.

Not only does Clinton share common goals with the neocons, she shares methods as well:

Beyond sharing this neocon “regime change” obsession, former Secretary of State Clinton also talks like a neocon. One of their trademark skills is to use propaganda or “perception management” to demonize their targets and to romanticize their allies, what is called “gluing white hats” on their side and “gluing black hats” on the other.

So, in defending her role in the Libyan “regime change,” Clinton called the slain Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi “genocidal” though that is a gross exaggeration of Gaddafi’s efforts to beat back Islamic militants in 2011. But her approach fits with what the neocons do. They realize that almost no one will dare challenge such a characterization because to do so opens you to accusations of being a “Gaddafi apologist.” ...

Clinton, like the neocons, also shows selective humanitarian outrage. For instance, she laments the suffering of Israelis under crude (almost never lethal) rocket fire from Gaza but shows next to no sympathy for Palestinians being slaughtered by sophisticated (highly lethal) Israeli missiles and bombs.

Then there's Hillary Clinton's dismal record on the environment. When she's trying to convince Sanders supporters to vote for her, she says things like, "We Democrats agree that climate change is an urgent threat, and it requires an aggressive response that can make America the clean energy superpower of the 21st century." But, alas, there's her record. Her support for fracking, actually, support is not a strong enough word - as Secretary of State, Hillary was a globetrotting salesman for fracking. She used her position as SOS to do favors for the oil and gas industry, helping break up Mexico's state oil company to open Mexico's resources and promote deepwater offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and onshore fracking in Mexico's portion of the Eagle Ford Shale basin - facts that only became public knowledge due to the contents she tried to hide on her private server being released.

Not surprisingly, Hillary's biggest campaign bundlers are fossil-fuel lobbyists. Also not surprisingly, Hillary Clinton's climate plan has virtually no details about how to keep fossil fuels in the ground.

Of course there's more, but isn't this about enough to demonstrate that Clinton is not the friend of the 99% and hasn't been throughout her political life?

While it might be charitable to consider the possibility of a Damascene conversion, common sense and a desire for preservation urges otherwise. Given Clinton's record, why she should be accorded a more favorable status than any other Republican is a mystery.