Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign is falling apart. Bernie Sanders soared in New Hampshire and now two polls have him tying her nationally. It’s a disaster.
Now she’s called in the B Team — the cynical, paranoid and wacky twins Sidney Blumenthal and David Brock — to bail her out. And here comes the elderly, diminished and livid former President Bill Clinton to lead the duo’s frantic attacks on Sanders.
{mosads}The attacks are rooted in nothing more than a list of dirty names they call the Vermont senator every day. Having found little in his record to attack, they have consulted the thesaurus to turn up ugly sounding accusations.
Sanders has a coherent, consistent and concise message: Incomes are stagnant because the economy is rigged by the top one-tenth of 1 percent that controls politics through massive campaign contributions.
Clinton has no competing message, just the charge that Sanders’s supporters are “sexist and vulgar.” Brock adds that one of Sanders’s ads was racist because it had too many white people in it.
Their strategy is laughable. After losing 84 percent of young voters in Iowa — and failing to recover them in New Hampshire — they sent in two aging fossils of feminism to insult and threaten young women.
The 81-year-old feminist Gloria Steinem charged that young women are only backing Sanders because that’s where they can meet boys. And 78-year-old Madeleine Albright threatened to consign to a “special place in hell” women who don’t back female candidates like Clinton.
Those are two great ways to attract young voters.
The aging and raging ex-president, meanwhile, speaking to a half-filled gym in a New Hampshire school, ranted about Sanders’s “hypocrisy” in condemning his wife’s paid speeches. Sanders, too, has given paid speeches, Bill Clinton claimed.
He’s got a point. In 2013, for example, Sanders made all of $1,500, which he donated to charity as required by federal law. In 2014, he raked in $1,850 for paid speeches. By contrast, Clinton made, and kept, over $21 million during the same time period. Sanders was only reimbursed for coach class airfare, while Clinton demanded private jets. Sanders’s hosts were the TV show “Real Time with Bill Maher,” Avalon Publishing and a machinists union. Clinton’s were Goldman Sachs, the big banks and the pharmaceutical and energy industries. What hypocrisy for Sanders to use that as an issue!
Both Brock and Blumenthal share the former first lady’s enthusiasm for discussing the “vast right-wing conspiracy” in America. Now that they’ve been outed as being back on her team, it’s easy to understand why Clinton sees conspiracies everywhere. This paranoia, egged on by the B Twins, explains her failure to grasp the cataclysmic changes her own misconduct has wrought on her image, to say nothing of the societal and economic tectonic shifts at work. No, it’s all the GOP’s fault.
Blumenthal worked to spin Monica Lewinsky as a crazed stalker of an innocent president, and his hundreds of gossipy emails urged Clinton to do all she could to topple Moammar Gadhafi when she was secretary of State without realizing that it would open the door and let the terrorists waltz in. He hides in the shadows, ducking subpoenas and frantically emailing his crazy self-serving ideas while flattering his way into Clinton’s affections.
Brock first came into the Clinton camp as a convert from conservatism. Before he did so, he outed Paula Jones, triggering Bill Clinton to lie to a grand jury, resulting in close to $1 million in payments to Jones and thousands to the court in fines, as well as disbarment and impeachment scandals. Now he serves to destroy Hillary Clinton’s career as well by counseling a scorched-earth policy that savages Sanders and alienates the very young people who must provide Clinton her political base in the general election.
Neither the B Twins nor Bill Clinton’s rage can save the bewildered former secretary of State, who cannot understand why a funny thing is happening on her way to her coronation. Voters looked at her and ran screaming.
Morris, who served as adviser to former Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and former President Clinton, is the author of 17 books, including his latest, “Power Grab: Obama’s Dangerous Plan for a One Party Nation” and “Here Come the Black Helicopters.” To get all of his and Eileen McGann’s columns for free by email, go to dickmorris.com.