It’s been a tough week for Hillary Clinton.
As I discussed in the previous post, Politico.com ran an article last Sunday talking about how the Clinton campaign hasn’t paid bills to certain vendors in months. Then, conveniently at 4PM on Friday, she released tax returns that indicate her and her husband made $109 million since they left the White House. In all honesty, though, the juiciest details probably won’t be found out for some time, if at all, since her and Mr. Clinton filed an extension for their 2007 returns. Looks like we won’t get to see if the $5M loan to her campaign came from unscrupulous sources until much after it would matter to this campaign.
Now, chief Clinton strategist Mark Penn has quit the campaign amid controversy that stems from a meeting he had with the Columbia’s ambassador to the United States to advocate for a labor treaty that the Columbian government wanted to see pass through Congress. Mrs. Clinton opposes the treaty.
Senator Clintons’ strategic messaging control will now be handed off at a critical time. It is just two weeks before the Pennsylvania primary, a critical contest for Mrs. Clinton’s presidential aspirations. Mr. Penn’s resignation now puts a punctuation mark on a bad week for Mrs. Clinton. Should she fail to win the Pennsylvania contest handily, the chorus of Democratic leaders insisting that she exit the race will only grow louder. And it is certainly not the time a presidential candidate would want their messaging to be anything but on point. It will be interesting to see if her campaign can achieve this.
