It is the beginning of the end of the House of Clinton:
1. There is the stench of political death around Hillary, Bill, Chelsea and the entire House of Clinton.
2. You could feel it when Republican front-runner Donald Trump hit back — hard — over the “penchant for sexism” charge by basically calling Hillary Clinton an enabler in the former president’s sexual shenanigans.
3. When have we ever seen the Clintons back off? But they did.
4. Then came further reports about an expanded FBI probe of her handling of secure information; the nexus of State Department favors for donors to the Clinton Foundation; and the story that Hillary Clinton or her staff might have lied to FBI agents in this probe.
5. All of this has raised the speculation, yet again: Will President Obama stop the Department of Justice (DOJ) from indicting her if the eight-person DOJ team working with over 100 FBI agents recommends criminal charges?
6. The president will be in an odd situation: He ran against the Clintons. He is known to loathe Bill Clinton. He apparently does not want the Clintons back in charge of the Democratic Party (thus removing the thousands of Obama acolytes with cushy patronage jobs).
7. So: If the DOJ recommends an indictment and he K.O.’s it, he will have his own legacy smeared with a permanent taint of having covered up for the Clintons.
8. If he allows an indictment to move ahead, that will be the end of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Period. She may think she can march on despite charges, but that would be self-delusional. Her campaign will be finished the day charges are filed by Obama’s Justice Department.
9. She can’t claim “politics as usual” or that old “right-wing conspiracy” nonsense as this will be Obama’s Justice Department — not a Republican-controlled entity — bringing these charges.
10. Now, even without an indictment, Hillary Clinton’s fortunes are rapidly sinking.
11. As of today, she is on track to lose both the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary — to an unelectable 72-year-old Vermont socialist!
12. That tells us how politically weak and out of it the Clinton machine has become.
13. It is no coincidence that Vice President Joe Biden has suddenly resurfaced — first in a Hartford, Conn. TV interview stating that he regrets not running “every day,” and then by softly criticizing Hillary Clinton for not leading on the anti-1 percent front.
14. Biden may very well be warming up in the bullpen for a possible emergency entry into the Democratic field once Clinton is charged and has to withdraw.
15. In the meantime, we see a frantic, panic-stricken Clinton family out on the stump hitting Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on healthcare and guns. But they’re hitting him from the center on healthcare — not the left, where the votes are.
16. They are running national TV ads on guns on MSNBC; there are ads every few minutes. If Team Clinton members think they can turn around her negative trajectory over guns, they are sorely mistaken.
17. Economics is the main issue.
18. And Hillary Clinton is seen as being in the tank for corporate interests, while Sanders has stood up to them. Period. That is the race.
19. The 2016 campaign is a political revolution.
20. The House of Bush is also falling.
21. So is the Establishment of both political parties.
22. Who is more establishment than the Clintons and the Bushes?
23. Who has milked the political system for more money, gigs, access and cushy jobs for cronies than the Clintons and the Bushes?
24. But this is the year that the public is standing up to the status quo.
25. We are witnessing history: the fall of the Houses of Clinton and Bush.
26. Who is rising?
27. The outsiders.
Further reading from a former Hillary senior aide: Admits Bill’s exploitation of women…
Politico: For the better part of the last month, Donald Trump has hit Hillary Clinton for playing the “woman’s card” in her attacks against him, frequently mentioning her husband’s past affairs in an attempt to discredit her argument that she would be champion for women in the White House.
For one of Clinton’s closest senior advisers as first lady, however, those arguments ring hollow.
“Here’s what I think about that: I think what Bill Clinton did in terms of infidelity was absolutely horrible. A shitty thing to do,” Patti Solis Doyle told David Axelrod in the latest episode of his “The Axe Files” podcast for the University of Chicago Institute of Politics, where she is a resident fellow this winter.
Remarking again what a “shitty thing” it was “to do to her,” Solis Doyle emphasized that it was the president, not his wife, who did anything wrong.
“It was awful. You know, many of us thought about quitting after what he did,” she revealed. “But when we thought about it – when I thought about it – I thought, she didn’t do anything. He is the jerk here.”
Solis Doyle surmised at another point that Axelrod was alluding to a comment in private correspondence in which Clinton wrote to a friend that Lewinsky was a “narcisstic loony toon.”
“It’s not like she went on television or said it publicly. She didn’t say anything publicly about any of the… And, you know, as a woman, if my husband were having some sort of extramarital affair with another woman, I’m sure I wouldn’t have very nice things to say about that woman either. I mean, that’s just normal,” she added. “But she never said anything publicly. And I think it’s its own form of sexism to somehow blame the spouse for what the husband did. I think that’s its own form of sexism.”
Solis Doyle advised Clinton during both of her Senate campaigns as well as serving as her campaign manager during her 2008 presidential campaign until a third-place finish in Iowa necessitated a change. She then worked as a senior adviser to Barack Obama’s campaign, serving as Joe Biden’s campaign chief of staff.
This time, while acknowledging that Bill appears to be the Clinton more at ease at rallies and on the rope line, Solis Doyle remarked that she had “no doubt” that her former boss would be the Democratic nominee.
“You know, Bill Clinton, he gets so much energy from the people at his rallies. When he’s working a rope line, you can just see him light up. You know, she’s tired. She gets tired. She does it. She does it dutifully. Is it her most fun thing to do? No. Would she rather be looking at policy and going through legislation and working with a bunch of experts on how to, you know, improve the Affordable Care Act? Absolutely,” Solis Doyle explained. “This is not her favorite thing to do. It’s a mean, you know, to an end, I guess.”
At the same time, she said, Clinton “seems much more comfortable in her skin this time around than she did in 2008 and I think she’s much more comfortable as a candidate.”
“I think she’s much more prepared for the rigors of a campaign. I always think that you learn so much more from losing than from winning,” she continued. “You learn many more lessons from losing a campaign than from winning one. I think that nobody likes an inevitable frontrunner.”
“I was in a discussion today and I quoted the famous Mario Cuomo about campaigning – ‘you campaign in poetry and govern in prose.’ She doesn’t seem all that comfortable with the poetry,” Axelrod mused. “I used to say that President Obama – and I suspect President Clinton as well – was the guy who cracked the book open the night before the exam, you know, and got the A. And she was the one who stayed up all night and did the extra credit.”
Solis Doyle agreed, responding that Clinton “does her homework” and might not be “the most inspirational kid in the class, right?”
“But man, do you want her running the country? Absolutely,” she said. “She has a level of competency that no one else has in this field both on the Republican side and on the Democratic side and in these times – we’re in some very tenuous times – I think you want her there at the helm.”
