Hillary Clinton has many weaknesses as a presidential candidate. One of them used to be her primary asset: her husband Bill. Indeed, we never would have heard of Hillary if she hadn’t married Bill, and her appeal to Democrats consists largely of nostalgia for his relatively successful administration.
But in an era that is exquisitely sensitive to sexual assault, serial sexual assaulter Bill Clinton may be turning into a liability. The most serious of the several credible charges against Clinton was asserted by Juanita Broaddrick, who says that Clinton raped her. Today in Derry, New Hampshire, Hillary was conducting a town meeting when a woman repeatedly stood up and tried to shout questions about Broaddrick. Hillary ignored the woman, and finally said: “You are very rude, and I’m not going to ever call on you.” Here is the video:
The pro-Hillary crowd naturally cheered her handling of the heckler. Moreover, the woman who tried to ask about Juanita Broaddrick is reportedly a GOP legislator from Derry and is being dismissed on that basis. But I wonder. It will always be true that Bill’s transgressions will be raised by Hillary’s political opponents. But what if they are raised often? What if everywhere Hillary goes, someone tries to bring up Juanita Broaddrick? What if people start paying attention to Kathleen Willey, who is alive and well and who says that Bill Clinton assaulted her in a room adjacent to the Oval Office?
Paul thinks that if Bill’s sexcapades didn’t hurt him (much) years ago, they will hardly hurt Hillary now. That may well turn out to be right. On the other hand, the Broaddrick and Willey stories were largely buried (compared with Monica Lewinsky, whose case was completely different) when Bill was president. It isn’t so easy to bury stories nowadays. Then, too, there are Bill’s rides on the Lolita Express with Jeffrey Epstein, who preyed on underage girls. Those haven’t yet been brought up on the campaign trail, but they could be.
If Bill is Hillary’s campaigner-in-chief, she can hardly complain if his own personal war on women gets mentioned. Currently, I doubt that ten percent of voters have any idea who Juanita Broaddrick is. But that will change if Hillary’s opponents are persistent. It seems to me that there is a real possibility that Broaddrick et al could become a millstone around Hillary’s neck, especially with younger voters who do not share the geriatric set’s warm feelings toward Bill.
UPDATE: Paula Jones is getting into the act, too. No doubt Hillary would like to call Jones a liar, but Bill paid Jones $850,000 to settle her sexual harassment suit. Can you imagine the fun Donald Trump, for one, would have with that? Plus, it was Bill Clinton, not Paula Jones, who was found by the presiding federal judge to have committed perjury.
There is no way Hillary can touch the Paula Jones case, but what if people start talking about it? Jones says:
And how dare her. You know what? She don’t care nothing about women. Because if she did she would believe what I had to say. She would believe what the other women had to say.
When Hillary cranks up her feminist shtick, who can deny that Jones has a point?
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