Clinton's goodwill among progressives corrodes after leaked email insults and Wall Street comments
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.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
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.
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
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.
-
What the new Making Tax Digital rules meanThe Explainer A new system will be introduced from April to overhaul how untaxed income is reported to HMRC
-
The former largest iceberg is turning blue. It’s a bad sign.Under the radar It is quickly melting away
-
Why Saudi Arabia is muscling in on the world of animeUnder the Radar The anime industry is the latest focus of the kingdom’s ‘soft power’ portfolio
-
TikTok secures deal to remain in USSpeed Read ByteDance will form a US version of the popular video-sharing platform
-
Unemployment rate ticks up amid fall job lossesSpeed Read Data released by the Commerce Department indicates ‘one of the weakest American labor markets in years’
-
US mints final penny after 232-year runSpeed Read Production of the one-cent coin has ended
-
Warner Bros. explores sale amid Paramount bidsSpeed Read The media giant, home to HBO and DC Studios, has received interest from multiple buying parties
-
Gold tops $4K per ounce, signaling financial uneaseSpeed Read Investors are worried about President Donald Trump’s trade war
-
Electronic Arts to go private in record $55B dealspeed read The video game giant is behind ‘The Sims’ and ‘Madden NFL’
-
New York court tosses Trump's $500M fraud fineSpeed Read A divided appeals court threw out a hefty penalty against President Trump for fraudulently inflating his wealth
-
Trump said to seek government stake in IntelSpeed Read The president and Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan reportedly discussed the proposal at a recent meeting
