It’s been a tough week for Hillary Clinton, with a flurry of bad news that is casting further doubt on her prospects for winning the Democratic Party nomination, let alone the White House.
She did receive a celebrity endorsement, but, alas, it came from pornographer Larry Flynt, and as Bloomberg’s John Heilemann observes, it “beggars belief that she and her team will be issuing any press releases touting the latest bold-faced name to clamber aboard her bandwagon.”
A new Associated Press-GfK poll finds Americans suspicious of Clinton’s honesty, and even many Democrats are only lukewarm about her presidential candidacy.
Her inability to explain the use of a private email server while secretary of state and allegations the Clintons have used their Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation for personal gain have affected public perceptions, the AP said. In the survey, 61 percent said “honest” describes her only slightly well or not at all.
The Washington Free Beacon reported the embattled Clinton Foundation and its major health charity have received more than $7 million in taxpayer funds in recent years, according to an analysis of public records.
The Boston-based health arm of the Clinton Foundation, known as CHAI, has come under scrutiny for failing to disclose donations from foreign governments in violation of a pledge Clinton made to the Obama administration before she assumed office as secretary of state, the Free Beacon reported.
The foreign donations to CHAI “sharply accelerated” when Clinton became secretary of state, the Boston Globe found.
Also, as WND reported, while skimming tens of millions of dollars from U.N. levies imposed on airline travelers, CHAI worked closely with a pharmaceutical company in India to distribute “drastically substandard” generic antiretroviral drugs to Third World countries that had no chance of helping HIV/AIDs patients, according to a Wall Street analyst.
‘She doesn’t have the whirr’
Meanwhile, the Weekly Standard reported that as Clinton scandals continue to mount and her credibility plummets, gleeful Republicans are quietly contemplating that Hillary might not survive the primary season.
The reason, however, according to veteran Democratic strategist Bob Shrum, is much deeper than Clinton cash and deleted emails.
The fundamental problem is that Hillary simply isn’t a very good candidate.
“I’ve seen her and him in rooms, and she doesn’t have the whirr,” said Shrum, who worked on the failed Al Gore and John Kerry campaigns. “Your eyes aren’t constantly drawn to her the way they are to him.”
In addition, the question of her age – in November 2016 she would be the second-oldest person to take the presidential oath for the first time, at age 69 – continually arises, with Republican candidates implying she is old while never saying it outright, Reuters reported.
She also has another rival, with self-declared socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, D-Vt., launching his campaign Thursday and declaring he is “in this race to win.”
The Hill said Sanders, though a long-shot, has a committed liberal grassroots following and will be “snapping at Clinton’s heels across vital states such as Iowa and New Hampshire.” He almost certainly will get to confront her in televised debates.
Activists who want to push Clinton further to the left say they have been heartened by her more populist rhetoric of late but remain skeptical of her.
“In Sanders we are seeing someone who argues for breaking up the big banks. … We have seen no statement to restore Glass-Steagall from Sen. Clinton,” Ryan Greenwood of the leftist National People’s Action Campaign told The Hill.
He was referring to the 1930s banking reform law that separated investment and commercial banking and was repealed during President Clinton’s administration.
