The Hillary Watch
A Brief History of Hillary’s Hypocrisy
Stick around a while and it’ll become much longer.
By Ross Kaminsky – 5.1.15
Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign mantra of “hope and change” was meaningless, thus leaving him free to act without fear of being accused of violating his principles, because he stated so few.
In comparison, at this early stage in her campaign, presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton is a ball of contradictions and hypocrisy that Republican candidates will pick at for the next 18 months until one of them defeats her in the 2016 presidential election.
On a Monday evening in March in a “room full of political reporters,” Mrs. Clinton said: “I am all about new beginnings.… So here goes, no more secrecy, no more zone of privacy.” Just four days later, Clinton’s attorney informed Congress that she had deleted all emails on a private server that she used for both personal and official State Department communications while serving as secretary of state, having delivered to the State Department only those that she deemed sufficiently work-related to turn over.
In 2007, then-Senator Clinton excoriated the Bush administration for “secret White House e-mail accounts,” saying that they represented “a stunning record of secrecy and corruption, of cronyism run amok.” Mrs. Clinton’s own secrecy and obvious conflicts of interest show that she has added hypocrisy to her (and her husband’s) history of above-the-law self-dealing.
Two weeks ago, Hillary announced that “we need to get unaccountable money out of the political system.” Yet just a few days earlier, her team made the shocking pronouncement that Hillary’s campaign intends to raise $2.5 billion, more than Barack Obama and Mitt Romney spent combined in 2014.
Just how “accountable” is $2.5 billion of spending, and just what would those donors think they’re buying?
Here’s a clue:
We now know that the Clinton Foundation received and did not disclose — breaking an agreement Mrs. Clinton made with the Obama administration when she became secretary of state — multi-million dollar contributions from foreign governments and foreign business interests with matters coming before the State Department for approval.
As Peter Schweizer, author of a forthcoming book entitled Clinton Cash, has noted, when it came to getting lucrative government contracts to rebuild Haiti after its devastating 2010 earthquake, “if you wanted a contract, if you wanted to do business in Haiti, you had to have relationships with a Clinton.”
That is the kind of president and presidency Hillary’s donors know they’re buying.
Hillary fulminates over CEOs making “300 times more than the American worker.” Putting aside the fact that this number is overstated by including restricted, non-cash, and deferred compensation, and that it only looks at the biggest companies in America even though those CEOs represent fewer than two tenths of one percent of all CEOs in the country, the insincerity of this complaint coming from a woman who earns speaking fees of over $80 per second is transparent.
In 10 minutes of the most overpriced speeches in history, Hillary Clinton receives the median annual salary for an American worker. It’s hard to imagine a CEO who wouldn’t envy such earning power. I don’t object to Mrs. Clinton earning what the market will bear, but her assault on CEO pay while pretending to channel her inner Elizabeth Warren is pure hypocrisy.
Hillary trumpets women’s rights and gay rights while her foundation takes money from Muslim dictatorships where women are treated as chattel and homosexuality is punishable by death.
She traveled to Iowa in a van even though she hasn’t driven herself anywhere in two decades, where she pretended to care about opinions of “everyday Iowans” by attending scripted and staged “round tables” at which the people who spoke with her were hand-picked Democratic operatives.
It’s no wonder that a majority of voters now believe Hillary is not “honest and trustworthy.” Americans won’t vote for a self-dealing phony who perfects her craft by learning from a husband whose well deserved nickname is “Slick Willie.” (Hillary may be relying on millennial voters not having a recollection of the Lincoln Bedroom-selling, foreign donation-receiving, intern-diddling sleaze-fest that was the Clinton presidency. But she won’t inspire young voters — who are particularly intolerant of hypocrisy — the way Barack Obama did.)
Yes, the same poll shows that Mrs. Clinton is viewed as a strong leader. But being a strong leader didn’t save Richard Nixon — who actually was one — whereas voters won’t believe even that of Hillary after 18 months of Republicans exposing her record.
Far more important, Americans are already evenly divided on the question of whether Hillary “cares about the needs and problems of people like you.” During Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign, 70 percent of voters, including a plurality of Republicans and a majority of men, answered yes to the same poll question about him. That number remained at 60 percent in 2012 whereas Mitt Romney earned only 46 percent, a single point lower than Hillary’s current position — and that was after a merciless liberal assault on Romney’s character. A Democrat who can’t do better than break-even on that particular trait is in a world of trouble.
Like turning a super-tanker, public opinion of a well-known figure is, in the absence of a cataclysmic event or revelation, slow to change. But with every few days bringing a new transparently insincere Hillary Clinton pronouncement as she explores previously unknown depths of hypocrisy, that is just what is happening to the likely Democratic presidential nominee. When it comes to election prospects for Hillary, the trend is not her friend.
Day after day, Hillary Clinton delivers a toxic stew of hypocrisy, disingenuousness, and mendacity, served up with a thin coating of saccharine rhetoric. Americans clearly aren’t biting.
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