Clinton's goodwill among progressives corrodes after leaked email insults and Wall Street comments

Hillary Clinton.
(Image credit: Getty Images)

If Hillary Clinton wins the White House, she may not be able to rely on progressives in government to facilitate her transition and agenda. For that, she can thank the content of thousands of emails hacked from campaign chair John Podesta's Gmail account that WikiLeaks continues to publish daily.

The emails see Clinton staff and confidants taking a dismissive posture toward those on their left, Politico reports, calling progressives and their causes "puritanical," "naive," and "dumb." Some progressives were even labeled "freaks" who should "get a life," and Podesta called Sen. Bernie Sanders a "doofus" for wanting stronger environmental regulations than those in the Paris climate change accord.

But worse than the personal insults are the Wall Street speech transcript excerpts the emails also include, which find Clinton assuring her audience she is more center than left. "We were already kind of suspicious of where Hillary's instincts were," Politico quotes an unnamed "influential liberal Democratic operative" as saying, "but now we see that she is who we thought she was. The honeymoon is going to be tight and small and maybe nonexistent" if she is elected.

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The Clinton campaign response emphasized their candidate's history of working "with progressive allies to aggressively develop serious and thorough plans to make real change." Throughout her primary campaign, Clinton cast herself as a "progressive who gets things done" in an attempt to mediate between her record and the more left-wing votes she then sought to wrest from Sanders.

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.