During Thursday's edition of MSNBC's Morning Joe program, Meet the Press host Chuck Todd responded to a question about Hillary Clinton -- the presumptive Democrat candidate for president in the upcoming 2016 election -- by stating: “The one thing I was impressed with this week was she did eat up a news cycle with immigration.”
The host of NBC's Sunday morning news and interview program asserted that when Clinton testifies before the Republicans in the House of Representatives, “it doesn't have a large impact. It becomes more guppies than piranhas.”
The discussion began when co-host Joe Scarborough referred to Clinton's strategy of avoiding questions from the press:
If you can't answer those questions now, it's not like it's going to be any easier in a month or two when even more information comes out. How does she start her campaign in earnest?
After stating that Clinton used a speech on immigration to “stop coverage of the funding scandal regarding the Clinton Foundation,” Todd called the tactic “jarring” and “a surprising rollout of her policy.”
Nevertheless, the liberal NBC host called the speech the Clintons' “one hope, that they could at least step on, hoping to slow down the Bill Clinton story.”
Todd was referring to the fact that the former U.S. president has been struggling to answer questions about the Clinton Foundation's funding from foreign countries. One such instance was an interview on Thursday with Norah O'Donnell of CBS This Morning, when he stated:
There is one set of rules that’s for politics in America, and another set for real life, and you just have to learn to deal with it.
There’s just no evidence. Even the guy that wrote the book [conservative author Peter Schweizer, who penned Clinton Cash] apparently had to admit under questioning that he didn't have a shred of evidence for this. He just sort of thought he would throw it out there and see if it would fly. And it won’t fly.
Meanwhile, Todd speculated: “I always wonder, did they mean to roll out any policy before she actually formally announced? I bet you they didn’t.”
“This is sort of the first time that she had rolled out any policy,” the host asserted. However, Evan McMurry of the Mediaite website stated: “It was actually her second policy proposal following a criminal justice reform speech at Columbia University last week.”
McMurry also noted Clinton Cash "has alleged that Clinton traded favorable treatment from the State Department for multi-million-dollar donations to the Clinton Foundation. The allegations also refocus scrutiny onto her use of a private email server while secretary of state and subsequent deletion of those emails.”
Referring to the Clintons and their staffs, Todd speculated:
I don't know. I think that they firmly believe that when she's testifying before in front of House Republicans, that it doesn't have a large impact. It becomes more guppies than piranhas, and as long as her chief antagonists are Congressional Republicans, that's how they think they sort of persevere.
“It might be winning ugly,” he continued. “Bill Clinton, I believe, had a lower 'honest and trustworthy' number than George H. W. Bush right going into the election day, and he had a lower 'honest and transparent [rating]' I believe, than [1996 GOP presidential candidate] Bob Dole, and he won both” elections.
However, the Clinton campaign strategy didn't last very long. As NewsBusters previously reported,
National Public Radio's All Things Considered newscast did a fact-check on Monday regarding the Clinton family’s claims about their foundation’s transparency.
Money and politics correspondent Peter Overby found both Chelsea Clinton and Bill Clinton weren’t entirely factual, exaggerating how transparent their foundation was. But NPR also quoted watchdogs who asserted this could just be an “innocent mistake.”
Overby concluded by stating:
So at least as things stand now, the Clinton Foundation transparency controversy resembles some of the other episodes of Clinton politics. It's a picture that's not terribly clear, shaped by exaggerations on both sides.
Then on Thursday, “NBC’s Today was the only 'Big Three' (ABC, CBS, NBC) network morning show to skip the ongoing questions surrounding the Clinton Foundation’s practice of taking money from foreign governments and companies that dates back to Hillary Clinton’s tenure at the State Department.”
Rather than cover the ongoing controversy, NBC's morning news program spent more than six minutes discussing the National Football League's finding in the New England Patriots’ “deflategate” controversy.
And to put the icing on the controversial cake, the liberal New Republic magazine stated on Thursday that Hillary Clinton's problems are caused by her husband and suggested she “Ditch Bill.”
Given Todd's analysis of the situation, Hillary Clinton might have to give speeches for 550 days in a row to make it to the White House on November 8 of next year. Judging from the record of her campaign so far, that would be a massive undertaking -- even for "The Smartest Woman in the World."
