Hillary Clinton isn’t just raising hell on her endless “Why I’m not president” excuse tour. She’s also still raising money via her campaign, helping fuel speculation that she may be entertaining a third White House run.
As the Washington Standard reports, “According to the FEC, Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign is still active, and it actually raised $165,902.73 during the first six months of 2019. During that same period of time, the campaign spent $131,112.68, and that left her with a war chest of $650,264.43. That isn’t enough to win the Democratic nomination, but it would certainly be enough to get another run for the White House off the ground rather quickly.”
Moreover, with “impeachment mania reaching a fever pitch in Washington and with the Biden campaign fading, Hillary may sense an opening,” the Standard theorizes. “She had a full slate of media appearances scheduled for this week, and so far she has done nothing to dispel the rumors that she may be getting into the race.”
The Standard isn’t alone in thus conjecturing. American Thinker’s Doris O’Brien opines today that Clinton does have the hope “that through some third-time’s-the-charm magic she could at last realize her dream of becoming the first female president of the United States.” The site’s editor in chief, keen Clinton watcher Thomas Lifson, wrote last Thursday that “Clinton is out there doing TV interviews, slimmed down and no longer wearing tent dresses, and looking ready for action. My wild guess is that she will enter the race.” And another Thinker writer, Bill Shanefelt, assuredly stated Friday that “Hillary’s going to get in.”
Also registering certainty is former chief strategist for President Trump, Steve Bannon. On Fox Business on Monday he said of Clinton, unabashedly, “She is running. She’s just trying to decide how to fit her way in.” Bannon’s theory (video below) is that the Democrat field is currently weak enough to give Clinton an opening.
If Clinton does run, she will enjoy the benefit of incumbency — at least in her own mind. Never able to accept her 2016 defeat — to explain it away she even (ghost?) wrote a book, What Happened? — Clinton’s litany of excuses (video below) for it have included “sexism,” white female voters controlled by their husbands, The Russians™, the (left-wing) media(!), Bernie Sanders, “voter suppression and voter purging,” “hacking,” and “false stories,” as she put it last weekend.
(Note that leftists define “voter suppression” thus: any attempt to prevent Democrat vote fraud. Because, of course, dead voters, multiple voters, and illegal-alien voters are voters, too!)
Yet now Clinton has transitioned from “I lost because” to “I didn’t really lose” because, as she recently put it, Trump is an “illegitimate president” (video below).
Interestingly, Clinton says above, “We know that the Russians hacked the DNC,” referencing damaging Democrat e-mails released by WikiLeaks. But not only is that disputed, consider that her complaint actually is, translated: The truth came out about us — and it was devastating!
Remember that leftists only complained about being hacked; they never disputed the accuracy of what was hacked.
Also note that the Obama administration actually used government intelligence agencies to spy on Trump, and even now deep state officials are using Gov-leaks to try to destroy him. Yet they can’t find anything more valid than the Russian-collusion hoax and the current Ukraine fantasy (and if geographical direction is any indicator here, the next scandal attempt should involve Moldova).
Moreover, Clinton has it exactly backwards. With extreme mainstream and social-media bias (a study found 92 percent of Trump coverage to be negative), vote fraud, vote harvesting, and with Trump raising only half the money Clinton did during the 2016 election cycle, it’s a miracle he won at all.
As for the 2020 cycle, why is there again talk of Clinton rising? It was largely unthinkable even six months ago; Clinton isn’t well liked, after all, and the Democrats at the time believed they had a strong bench. But their prize identity-politics candidate, Senator Kamala Harris, fizzled, with Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard’s help; Jumblin’ Joe Biden is an imploding gaffe machine; Bernie Sanders just had a heart attack; and the other candidates have all taken radical positions (e.g., free healthcare for illegals) that many Democrats fear render them unelectable. So now Hillary, who could conceivably enter the primaries late and without adopting those extreme stances, may look good in comparison.
That said, Clinton is prideful. I suspect she only enters races she believes she’ll almost surely win (she had reason to believe she’d prevail in 2008 and 2016, before suffering two humiliating defeats to Barack Obama and Trump). So I think that, first, columnist Mark Steyn may be correct when saying (last video above) that she wants to be “asked” to run. Second, it’s likely she’d only consider joining the fray under two scenarios:
• if internal polling shows her a shoe-in for the nomination (losing to Elizabeth Warren would be an unacceptable humiliation); or
• if she’s drafted during a brokered convention.
Of course, Clinton had in March ruled out a 2020 presidential run. But that was then. She also was against same-sex “marriage” before she was for it and for Obama’s trade and immigration policies before she was against them. It all depends on what her “truth” is when the time comes.
Photo: AP Images
