Democratic Support Falls For Hillary Clinton Even Prior To Yet Another Clinton Scandal

Hillary Clinton speaks at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York

There is yet another scandal involving Hillary Clinton, with the latest Reuter’s poll showing a drop in Democratic support for Clinton even before today’s scandal broke. First the latest scandal, then the poll.

Barack Obama came into office promising greater transparency. This included changing email practices following the abuses under George Bush–abuses which Hillary Clinton referred to as shredding the Constitution. We now know that Clinton violated the rules. Obama also wanted greater transparency regarding contributions to eliminate concerns that members of his administration were serving interests other than the interests of the voters. Reuters found that Clinton violated promises made upon taking office regarding disclosure of contributions:

In 2008, Hillary Clinton promised Barack Obama, the president-elect, there would be no mystery about who was giving money to her family’s globe-circling charities. She made a pledge to publish all the donors on an annual basis to ease concerns that as secretary of state she could be vulnerable to accusations of foreign influence.

At the outset, the Clinton Foundation did indeed publish what they said was a complete list of the names of more than 200,000 donors and has continued to update it. But in a breach of the pledge, the charity’s flagship health program, which spends more than all of the other foundation initiatives put together, stopped making the annual disclosure in 2010, Reuters has found.

In response to questions from Reuters, officials at the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) and the foundation confirmed no complete list of donors to the Clintons’ charities has been published since 2010. CHAI was spun off as a separate legal entity that year, but the officials acknowledged it still remains subject to the same disclosure agreement as the foundation.

The finding could renew scrutiny of Clinton’s promises of transparency as she prepares to launch her widely expected bid for the White House in the coming weeks. Political opponents and transparency groups have criticized her in recent weeks for her decision first to use a private email address while she was secretary of state and then to delete thousands of emails she labeled private.

The two scandals very well might be connected. While there is no way to prove this after Clinton destroyed some of the email, members of the news media have suggested that if Clinton was hiding anything, it was most likley regarding contributions to the Foundation, as opposed to any smoking guns related to Benghazi. This includes liberal columnist Frank Rich, along with Ron Fournier, who wrote:

“Follow the money.” That apocryphal phrase, attributed to Watergate whistle-blower “Deep Throat,” explains why the biggest threat to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential dreams is not her emails. It’s her family foundation. That’s where the money is: corporate money, foreign money, gobs of money sloshing around a vanity charity that could be renamed “Clinton Conflicts of Interest Foundation.”

Despite all the evidence that Clinton broke the rules in effect when she took office, many Democrats will continue to defend her because of her name and gender. Some Democrats would continue to defend Clinton even if we had  incontrovertible evidence that she kicks puppies and bar-b-que babies. While maybe exaggerating, it seems that there is no crime which will cause some Democrats to question Hillary Clinton–even if it is something they previously attacked Republicans for. So much for consistency or adherence to principle.

Fortunately this does not apply to all Democrats. A new Reuters/Ipsos poll does show support for Clinton to be softening:

Support for Clinton’s candidacy has dropped about 15 percentage points since mid-February among Democrats, with as few as 45 percent saying they would support her in the last week, according to a Reuters/Ipsos tracking poll. Support from Democrats likely to vote in the party nominating contests has dropped only slightly less, to a low in the mid-50s over the same period.

Even Democrats who said they were not personally swayed one way or another by the email flap said that Clinton could fare worse because of it, if and when she launches her presidential campaign, a separate Reuters/Ipsos poll showed.

The polling showed that nearly half of Democratic respondents – 46 percent – agreed there should be an independent review of all of Clinton’s emails to ensure she turned over everything that is work-related.

The bigger problem is that while Democrats might stick with her and give her the nomination, by November 2016 a majority of the voters will have had enough of what could be a constant stream of revelations about Clinton. Giving Hillary Clinton the Democratic nomination increasingly looks like a death wish on the part of Democrats.