Two-time loser on the national stage Hillary Clinton will be hosting three Democratic National Committee fundraisers this fall, and the sigh you just heard comes from forlorn Democrats who keep hoping this albatross on their party’s future will stop appearing on their already storm-tossed horizon.
News of Hillary’s high-profile fundraising right before the crucial midterm elections has naturally left Republicans delighted.
“Hillary is out there doing our jobs for us,” a GOP strategist told Breitbart News in response. “The more she associates herself with any candidate, the less money we have to spend on attack ads targeting them. Voters have a visceral negative reaction to Hillary Clinton.”
Ideal Opposition
Indeed, “Crooked Hillary,” as President Trump so famously calls her, is the gift that keeps on giving for the GOP.
After all, the woman who knee-capped her own 2016 presidential bid by calling a large segment of the potential voter pool “deplorables” instead of trying to win them over was at it again as recently as March, when she said in India:
“If you look at the map of the United States, there is all that red in the middle, places where Trump won. What that map doesn’t show you is that I won the places that own two thirds of America’s Gross Domestic product. I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward. And his whole campaign, Make America Great Again, was looking backwards. You don’t like black people getting rights, you don’t like women getting jobs, you don’t want to see that Indian American succeeding more than you are, whatever that problem is, I am going to solve it.”
Gee, I wonder why Democratic campaign consultant Doug Schoen urged her to “exit the stage” back in September 2017?
Doug Schoen
“Today, the likelihood of Clinton exiting the national spotlight and allowing a new generation of party leaders to emerge appears to be slim,” Schoen presciently wrote at the time in an op-ed for The Hill.
“Clinton’s continued effort to be a leading figure in the party could severely hurt chances for Democrats in 2018, as well as 2020,” he emphasized.
“As I have said before, her terribly unclear agenda, lack of a plan for economic growth and distasteful attacks against Republicans all led to her inevitable loss. She simply does not stand for anything.”
Schoen summed up the prevailing mood among Democrats hoping to win in 2018 when he quoted Rep. Jared Huffman of California as saying, “there is a collective groan whenever there’s another news cycle about [Clinton].”
Party Members Flee
An April NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found Hillary’s favorability rating cratering at 27 percent, with 52 percent of those polled holding a negative view of her – and 36 percent of those people saying their opinion of her was “very negative.”
Of course it goes without saying that Hillary is electoral cancer to Democrats in red states.
Sen. Claire McCaskill
“For those of us that are in states that Trump won, we would really appreciate if she would be more careful and show respect to every American voter and not just the ones who voted for her,” Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri said to MSNBC in the wake of Clinton’s India comments.
Alex Leary of the Tampa Bay Times describes a clearly wary Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida, who Leary says was an “enthusiastic” Hillary supporter in 2016, running for cover in this election year.
Asked if an engaged Hillary would provide a boost to his campaign, the senator sheepishly responded:
“I’m not going to answer that. Obviously when she was a candidate, I campaigned with her. That’s like you asking me would I campaign with Robert Redford. … We’ll take that up when we get there.”
Won’t Go Away
Hillary has acknowledged that she has heard the calls for her to move out of her fellow Democrats’ way, and her answer, conjuring up the party’s most fatal flaw – identity politics – seems almost designed to break strategic-minded Dems’ hearts.
“They never said that to any man who was not elected,” she snapped in remarks made at Rutgers University in New Jersey in late March, NJ.com reported.
And then she vowed that she wasn’t going anywhere.
“I am really committed to speaking out and doing what I can to have a voice in the debate,” Clinton promised an adoring urbanite university crowd.
“You won’t be surprised to hear me say that I have some concerns.”
Elated Republicans can’t wait for her to express every single one of them from now until November.
