HILLARY CRISIS? – AT 9:46 A.M. ET:  It's just stunning – the degree to which Hillary Clinton has flopped.  She's declining in popularity polls, and her public appearances are terrible, bordering on bizarre.  Normally friendly journalists are growing publicly skeptical.  This woman is not ready for a presidential campaign.  John Hinderaker, at Powerline, gives a great take on the great decline. 

The Democrats have a Hillary Clinton problem. She is, at the moment, their only plausible presidential contender for 2016. The clownish Joe Biden apparently is her chief rival, and when pressed to identify a possible new face, the only one the Dems can come up with is the Governor of Maryland, Martin O’Malley, whom hardly any voters have heard of. So the party has a great deal riding on Hillary’s supposedly powerhouse candidacy.

The problem is that Hillary is a pretty lousy candidate. She got elected to the Senate by cheating, essentially: she ran in New York, a state where she did not live, while she was residing in the White House as First Lady. That was her big win. In 2008, she supposedly was the candidate of destiny, but it turned out that she couldn’t beat the lightly-qualified Barack Obama, who, until well into the process, was generally thought to be running for the vice-presidential slot on the ticket.

Since Hillary launched her 2016 campaign with a book tour, we have been reminded once again of what a tin-eared candidate she is. Apparently sensitive about the Clintons’ vast, and largely ill-gotten, wealth, and remembering how her own party pilloried Mitt Romney for his financial success–in his case, deserved–Hillary tried to pose as a woman of the people, claiming that she and Bill were “dead broke” when they left the White House. Of course, they earned (if you want to call it that) well over $12 million in their first year as private citizens, so their “dead broke” condition didn’t last long.

And this was a completely unforced error. “Dead broke?” Seriously? Wait until she has to answer questions about Benghazi! And Syria. And Russia. And Iraq.

COMMENT:  And it gets worse.  Whenever Hillary is taking heat, she pulls out the gender card.  As AP reported:  'We live with a double standard' Clinton told ABC News as she kicked off a tour for 'Hard Choices,' her memoir. 'People ought to think about their own daughters, their own sisters, their own mothers, when they make comments about women in public life.'"

Huh?  We aren't allowed to comment about women in public life?  Strange, I never heard that excuse from Sarah Palin, or from female Republican governors like Nikki Haley in South Carolina or Susana Martinez in New Mexico?  Or from Republican Senator Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, who's becoming a major player in the U.S. Senate. 

Maybe Hillary is special. 

June 14, 2014