Hillary Is in Big Trouble Clinton increasingly seems stuck in the past, dogged by wilting poll numbers and heavy baggage. By Fred Barnes
http://www.wsj.com/articles/hillary-is-in-big-trouble-1453247735
Presidential races are about the future and Hillary Clinton is stuck in the past. That pretty much explains why her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016 has slumped.
Mrs. Clinton is not attuned to the political situation she faces. Her experience, family and fame aren’t much help. This year, angry voters have turned increasingly to populist, antiestablishment and future-oriented candidates. As a status quo candidate, she doesn’t fit the moment.
But her chief opponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders, has captured it, just as Donald Trump has in the Republican presidential race. Mr. Sanders, 74, is a socialist from Vermont with a Brooklyn accent. But more than his left-wing ideology, it is his persistent calls for a “revolution” upending conventional politics that has brought him neck-and-neck with Mrs. Clinton in Iowa and ahead in New Hampshire, the first states to vote in the fight for the Democratic nomination.
For months Mr. Sanders has attracted bigger crowds than Mrs. Clinton and stirred more excitement. She and her strategists underestimated Mr. Sanders’s appeal, the strength of his campaign and his ability to raise money. They also overestimated Mrs. Clinton’s skill as a candidate.
Michael Warren, my Weekly Standard colleague, summarized her visit to Iowa earlier this month: “There’s no other way to say it: Hillary Clinton is very boring. The Democratic presidential front-runner’s campaign stops are, too. The members of her traveling press corps look like they’d rather be anywhere else. So do some of the attendees, who shift in their seats starting around minute 10. Even the campaign staffers pace the back of the room or tap inattentively on their iPhones as Clinton drones on.”
Mrs. Clinton’s past was expected to be a great benefit to her campaign. It hasn’t been. To begin with, her husband, former President Bill Clinton, has turned into an albatross. In an interview with the Des Moines Register just before Christmas, Mrs. Clinton said Donald Trump has “demonstrated a penchant for sexism.”
Mr. Trump answered on Twitter: “Hillary, when you complain about a ‘penchant for sexism,’ who are you referring to? BE CAREFUL.” He followed by recalling her husband’s history of womanizing, accusing him of “a terrible record of women abuse.” Mr. Trump warned her against using the “woman’s card” against him.
When she ran for the Senate from New York in 2000, her husband’s infidelity created sympathy for her. Not this time. Mr. Trump “has a point about Clinton playing the ‘woman’s card,’ and about the male behavior that is more concerning: her husband’s,” Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus wrote on Dec. 28. A few days later, in USA Today, Kirsten Powers wrote that there is now “a blessedly lower tolerance for sexual assault and harassment. . . . This is good news for America, but bad news for the Clintons.”
Similarly, Mrs. Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state was supposed to be an asset in the presidential race. On the contrary, her use of a private email system on which classified information was transmitted is under FBI investigation. And the State Department has been forced to release a monthly stream of her emails. On CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, she was asked if she has been interviewed yet by FBI agents. Her terse answer: “No.” That may change. On Tuesday Fox News published a Jan. 14 letter from the inspector general of the intelligence community to senior lawmakers stating that a review by intelligence agencies found “several dozen emails” containing “classified” and “top secret” information in Mrs. Clinton’s unsecured server.
The new movie “13 Hours” is another detriment. The film depicts the hours in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012 when American Ambassador Chris Stevens, a foreign-service officer, and two CIA contract employees were killed by terrorists. Mrs. Clinton is not mentioned by name. It is clear, however, that security for Mr. Stevens was woefully inadequate (despite his many requests for more guards) and that no help was dispatched when he and the American consulate were under attack.
A year ago, polls revealed that Mrs. Clinton’s honesty and trustworthiness are doubted by many Americans. In a Fox News survey last April, 51% said they didn’t feel she is honest and trustworthy. This month that number rose to 62%. Only 32% said they trust her.
Numerous false statements Mrs. Clinton made about her email system have led to speculation about what she was hiding. Parents of two CIA employees killed in Benghazi insist that she told them that an anti-Islam video had prompted the attack. In truth, she knew it was an attack planned and carried out by terrorists. Mrs. Clinton denies that she blamed a video.
A series of Mrs. Clinton’s flip-flops aimed at neutralizing positions taken by Mr. Sanders have played a part in her troubles. She once called the Trans-Pacific Partnership the “gold standard” for trade treaties, then joined him in opposing it. Like Mr. Sanders, she came out last year against the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada that her State Department had cleared. Soon after he proposed free college, she backed debt-free college.
Her relationship with Wall Street is also a source of doubts. As a senator, she “took a mostly hands-off approach to Wall Street regulation,” the Boston Globe noted on Sunday. According to public sources cited by the Intercept, she reaped more than $2.9 million in speaking fees from “Wall Street banks, private equity firms, and other financial corporations” from 2013-15. Yet in Sunday’s debate, she acted unfriendly to Wall Street—again echoing Mr. Sanders—by vowing to pay for social programs out “of the pockets of people in the financial service industry.”
Presidential candidates normally offer a raft of new ideas. Even Mr. Sanders, though bound by his 19th-century ideology, has a few. Mrs. Clinton has zero.
This shortcoming was apparent when, in a speech last July, she proposed raising the capital-gains tax rate. She argued that doing so was needed to curb “short-termism” and promote long-term investment instead. To justify the tax increase, Mrs. Clinton cited a short-term investment problem that no longer exists.
Mr. Barnes, executive editor of the Weekly Standard, is a Fox News commentator.
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