Accusing 69-year-old GOP front-runner real estate mogul and former reality TV star Donald Trump of “sexism,” Democratic front-runner former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton thought she’d get a pass. Trump fired back quickly accusing the 68-year-old former New York Senator of hypocrisy, sending her husband, former President Bill Clinton, out on the campaign trail. Bill was dogged in 1998 for a good three years for his “inappropriate” conduct with 20-year-old White House intern Monica Lewinsky. While it’s old news now, it’s fair game now that Hillary’s inclined to attack Trump for his “bigotry, bluster and bullying.” Referring to Trump’s comments toward Muslims or, more recently, his remarks at the Dec. 15 ABC Democratic debate calling Hillary’s extended bathroom break “disgusting” or her loss to Barack Obama in 2008 as getting “schlonged,” Hillary stepped into it.
Unlike other GOP candidates, Trump’s demonstrated, through Twitter, a penchant toward responding in “real time” to attacks from his critics. Trump put Hillary on notice that if she plays hardball, she can expect to get back the medicine many times over. “Nothing really surprises me anymore. I don’t know that he has any boundaries at all. His bigotry, his bluster, his bullying have become his campaign. And he has to keep sort of upping the stakes and going even further,” Hillary told the Des Moines Register, a paper with an ax to grind against Trump. “Hillary Clinton has announced that she is letting her husband out to campaign,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “But HE’S DEMONSTRATED A PENCHANT FOR SEXISM, so inappropriate,” Trump Tweeted, reacting to Hillary’s attacks in the Des Moines Register. Trump’s tit-for-tit works for now, without going into any real substance.
If Hillary puts Bill on the campaign trail, he’s fair game for Trump or any other Democratic or Republican candidate. Hillary’s smart enough to know that if you mess with Trump, you’re going to get hit hard. “I really deplore the tone of his campaign, the inflammatory rhetoric that he is using to divide people, and his going after groups of people with hateful, incendiary rhetoric,” said Hillary, referring to Trump’s unrealistic proposal to temporarily ban Muslims from entering the U.S. Trump should be very pleased with Hillary that she’s targeting him as the potential winner of the GOP presidential sweepstakes. No one inside the GOP, or, for that matter, in the mainstream media, has conceded anything regarding Trump winning the GOP nomination. Admitting that Trump looks well-positioned to win the nomination, Hillary looks ahead to her potential rival.
Trump warned Hillary Dec. 23 to “be careful” about injecting the sexist or race card in the 2016 campaign. Hinting that he’d dredge up Bill’s indiscretions with Monica Lewinsky, Trump reminded Hillary that anything’s fair game. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), whose presidential campaign is all-but-dead, ripped Bill Clinton’s past affair with Monica Lewinksy. Calling the former president a “predator,” Paul offers the GOP the same red meat, once a staple of the Fox News Channel. Calling Trump a “sexist” opens up a can-of-worms for Hillary, dragging her husband into the fray. Because there’s no excuse for a president taking advantage of a 20-year-old intern, there’s simply no wining-for-losing for Hillary’s campaign. Instead of giving Trump more ammo, Hillary should be avoiding dust-ups with Trump, focusing on what she thinks are voters’ hot-button campaign issues in 2016.
Pointing fingers at Trump’s sexist or racist remarks opens Hillary up to start explaining more tough questions in campaign 2016. Raising her husband’s mischief with a former White House intern doesn’t address what happened in Libya, where the policy set by President Barack Obama and accepted by Hillary resulted in the U.S. government helping to topple former Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. When confronted with her decision Oct. 11, 2002 to back in the U.S. Senate the Iraq War Authorization, Hillary admits she made a bad mistake. When talking about toppling Gaddafi Aug. 23, 2011, Hillary talks of preventing “genocide” in Libya, not that she repeated the same mistake in ousting Saddam April 10, 2003. Calling Trump a misogynist or anything else won’t erase Hillary’s foreign policy blunders that have lasting consequences on U.S. foreign policy, especially counter-terrorism,
Rolling out her husband in the 2016 campaign, Hillary faces the same old issues that left Bill the laughingstock of GOP politics. Once calling accusations in 1998 about her husband’s tryst with Monica a product of a “vast right wing conspiracy,” Hillary showed she knows how to blow smoke with the best of them. Neither Democrats nor Republicans want to believe that Trump has the staying power to win the GOP nomination, let alone take the White House. Asked whether or not he thought Trump could win the GOP nomination, Bill Clinton gave an unfiltered answer. “I think so; how do I know?” said Bill. “But he’s got a lot of pizzazz and zip, he’s branded himself in a clear way. And he’s generated some excitement. An it remains to be seen what’s going to happen,” said Bill, letting both sides of the aisle know that Trump’s candidacy should be taken seriously.
