First, there has been a string of high profile interviews which were full of gaffes, testy exchanges, and an element of annoyance on the part of Hillary Clinton. Next, there were revelations that her book only sold 60,000 copies the first week. The publisher already printed a million hard cover copies indicating they were expecting a much higher number.
Report on Hillary’s missteps via the Weekly Standard:
By just about every account, her book is uninteresting and unreflective, a carefully contrived piece of positioning. Yet instead of owning that, she insisted at an event that she was “done with being really careful about what to say.” And that was before uttering inanities about how “the American political system is the most difficult, even brutal, in the world .” (She might look at Egypt, for instance. Or Venezuela. Or China. Or Greece. Or Russia. Or any country where instability and chaos is the norm and the children of former presidents aren’t given $600,000 sinecures from independent_”independent”?_media conglomerates.)
Then there was her Romney-esque statement about being “dead broke” after leaving the White House and her being so out of touch as to suggest that she and her husband “struggled” to “piece together the resources for mortgages, for houses, for Chelsea’s education.” “You know,” she said, looking for sympathy, “it was not easy.” It’s hard to think of a more let-them-eat-cake moment from any Democratic politician in the last 40 years. But what made the line even worse is that it was made in defense of taking exorbitant speaking fees from companies such as Goldman Sachs. You half expected her to explain, hedge funds are people, my friends!
And then there was her encounter with Terry Gross, in which Clinton couldn’t handle the tough questions … from NPR.
The author concludes asking whether Hillary Clinton is “imploding” with mistakes in interviews set against a backdrop of a rapidly deteriorating foreign policy situation in the Middle East and elsewhere.
My feeling is that a set of interviews, at this point in the 2016 cycle, does not an implosion make. Perhaps if this happened in June of 2015 instead of 2014, this would be signs of trouble. As it is, I think the book tour was a good test run for a presidential campaign. Long hours, lots of travel, numerous questions and ways to field test answers to pressing issues.
