The Deep Thinkers among the Democrats are coming up with new and creative excuses for Hillary Clinton’s stumbles on the campaign book promotion trail. Stuck with a frontrunner that demands between two and three hundred thousand dollars for a 60 minute stint behind a podium and then claims that “hard work” is responsible for her wealth, the Democrats are desperate to come up with something other than the obvious explanation that the woman is a hypocrite of the first order.

So far, my favorite rationalization comes from one Jamie Traeger-Muney, “a psychologist whose Wealth Legacy Group focuses on counseling the affluent.” (Is the part of her name behind the hyphen pronounced “money,” I wonder?)

Pause for moment to savor Ms. Traeger-Muney’s mission in life. The kind of rich affluent people who achieve that status by means of “legacy” and feel guilty about it are the real core of the Democratic Party, not the poor or the hard-working (two groups which overlap to a diminishing degree in this era of labor force shrinkage and welfare explosion). It is the guilty liberals who inherited money or made it by questionable means, like the billionaire Tom Steyer who financed coal and fossil fuel projects to make his fortune and now offers a hundred million dollars to Democrat candidates who will oppose the Keystone Pipeline, that provide the monetary mother’s milk sustaining the Dems, and who therefore call the shots.

Having made her own fortune dispensing succor to the guilty heirs and heiresses of the left, Ms. Traeger-Muney is well-positioned to call Hillary’s problem another example of the human suffering she has spent her professional energies ameliorating. Via Ben White of Politico:

“Her responses so far have come off as somewhat disingenuous, probably because she has a lot of ambivalence about her own wealth.”

Not because she is a phony, lying hypocrite, posing as a friend to the common woman, but because she has an exquisitely honed moral center (just like Traeger-Muney’s client base, who are better than their station in life). No, no, no. Hillary Clinton cares so deeply that she persecutes herself, on behalf of the common woman. What a noble sacrifice she does in our name! Move aside, Mother Teresa, another giant of the human conscience has taken her place beside you.

So what is Hillary to do?

“It would be great for her to explore her own ambivalence around wealth and what it means to have her policy views and be a wealth holder,” Traeger-Muney said. “The moment she’s at peace with that for herself, the need for coaching would diminish.”

Yes, what America needs right now is a leader who can bravely explore her own ambivalence about wealth. That’s the ticket. Why she can pick up the ball from President Obama, who seems to feel that the United States does not deserve the wealth and power it has achieved in the last two and a half centuries.

With Hillary Clinton holding such power in it, the Democratic Party is sliding into self-parody, powered by the guilt and self-doubt of the rich liberals who want to pose as saviors of those who have less than they do. It is the party of the guilty conscience, in which the fate of the nation is held hostage to the inner turmoil of its rulers. I think that is the very definition of decadence.