Hillary Clinton is the most cynical, two-faced candidate ever to run for president. She admits as much in a new batch of thousands of emails released by WikiLeaks yesterday.
The emails belong to her campaign manager, John Podesta, who sent around snippets of Clinton’s talks to Wall Street bankers as examples of “land mines” in her record that it might be necessary to respond to.
If they had been released on a day where Donald Trump was taking a nap rather than having to deal with crude, vulgar characterizations of women, they might have proven to be a problem, indeed. But whether it’s coincidence or not — and I tend to doubt it — the emails had to share attention with Trump’s misogyny.
New York Times:
In the excerpts from her paid speeches to financial institutions and corporate audiences, Mrs. Clinton said she dreamed of “open trade and open borders” throughout the Western Hemisphere. Citing the back-room deal-making and arm-twisting used by Abraham Lincoln, she mused on the necessity of having “both a public and a private position” on politically contentious issues. Reflecting in 2014 on the rage against political and economic elites that swept the country after the 2008 financial crash, Mrs. Clinton acknowledged that her family’s rising wealth had made her “kind of far removed” from the struggles of the middle class.
So I guess it’s not paranoia or misrepresentation of Clinton’s views to say she supports open borders, the globalist perspective, and is out of touch with ordinary voters.
Bernie Sanders was on to something.
Sanders, who before his presidential bid was an independent senator and self-described democratic socialist, led a credible challenge to Clinton based on frustration with Wall Street’s access to lawmakers, the revolving door between regulators and those they regulate, and how Washington’s political class has lost touch with America’s middle class.
The emails show that Sanders, who has since endorsed Clinton, had a point.
In one email in Podesta’s inbox, first reported by BuzzFeed, the Clinton campaign appears to summarize their candidate’s most shocking statements made during private speeches to Wall Street firms and other business organizations.
Apparently anticipating the possibility of a leak of private speech transcripts, which were a controversial issue during the Democratic primary earlier this year, Clinton Research Director Tony Carrk put together a memo with the most damaging quotes she had made in private speeches. Ironically, these were later leaked.
“I represented and worked with so many talented principled people who made their living in finance,” she said in one 2014 speech to Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd, a firm that specializes in complex securities litigation on behalf of investors, according to the email that was sent to Podesta and other senior aides.
In a series of speech excerpts from April 2013 to January 2015, Clinton supported open markets in the Americas; speaks of the need for a “public and private position” while “back room discussions” are taking place; and complained that conflict of interest divestments were unnecessary for politicians.
For Clinton, it is an embarrassing revelation that strikes to her greatest vulnerability: that she can’t be trusted, doesn’t mean what she says and is too close to the big banks—all at a time when she is struggling to generate enthusiasm among the young progressives who backed Sanders over her in the primary.
How much does this change the perception of Hillary Clinton? Like Trump’s outrageous comments about women, it doesn’t move the needle much at all. People know Trump by now and most are not surprised. The same holds for Hillary Clinton — already the most mistrusted major-party candidate for president in history.
It will take more than dirty talk from Trump and unsurprising “revelations” about Clinton to upset this campaign and give one candidate a decisive advantage.
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