Beware a Wounded Clinton

FEB 10, 2016 2:19 PM EST
By Margaret Carlson

Hillary and Bill Clinton were prepared to lose, but there’s a loss and then there’s a shellacking. After barely winning Iowa, with its coin tosses and independent calls for a public recount of the secret ballots, getting trounced by Bernie Sanders in New Hampshire by 20 points suggests tissue-rejection of the Clinton candidacy. It’s likely some of those voters weren’t even pro-Sanders, just turned off by Clinton. The Republican race is starting to look tame by comparison.

The rejection went to her character. Among Democrats who say they care most about honesty and trustworthiness, she lost by 86 points. None of Bill’s lip-biting brand attached to her: She lost by 65 points among those who want their candidate to care about people like themselves. Then there are the women. Although they were threatened with eternal damnation, a majority of women -- seven in 10 under 45 -- did not vote for the would-be first female president.

The Clintons’ shell-shocked expressions on stage in New Hampshire Tuesday night showed that they now see reality. It’s going to be a long, hard and painful slog against someone without her experience but who stirs admiration and affection. Hillary could have spoken from the heart -- even the robotic Marco Rubio managed that in his concession -- but she read from the teleprompter, though at times she edged close to Howard Dean’s post-Iowa scream in 2004.

The map favors her going forward, but if she were flying commercial, she would have to pay additional fees for all her extra baggage. She’s dragging a steamer trunk of worry over the State Department e-mails still dribbling out. A federal judge yesterday gave the Justice Department one day to explain why 7,000 pages of messages were not handed over earlier and portions of another 3,700 can’t be produced by the Feb. 18 deadline. That’s small potatoes compared to the FBI investigation into the legality of the whole private and unsecured server she set up for her “convenience.”

With the loss, cries for her to release the transcripts of her $675,000 Goldman Sachs payday are getting louder. It’s not like the Clintons to hand over anything willingly, even though the actual speeches aren’t likely to be all that damaging. They probably consist of anodyne travelogues with a few jokes, mentions of being a grandmother and some rote pandering to the audience. But the real action takes place outside the formalities. The big bucks are paid for face time, sometimes a meal, with the hosts and their top clients. A speech? $300,000. A future phone call returned (Remember me? We met at the Goldman Sachs conference)-- priceless. That’s why members of Congress are not allowed to do it anymore.

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http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-02-10/beware-a-wounded-clinton