John Halpin of the left-wing think tank Center for American Progress, formerly headed by Podesta, wrote his boss and Jennifer Palmieri in 2011 that conservatives are attracted to Catholicism for its “systematic thought and severely backwards gender relations.” Palmieri, now a spokeswoman for the Clinton campaign, chimed in that those on the right embrace Catholicism as “the most socially acceptable politically conservative religion.”
A certain highhandedness and bad faith pervades the entire Clinton campaign. Hillary Clinton was perfectly comfortable with the globe-trotting financiers throwing six-figure speaking fees at her, but then had to turn around and shovel boob bait for Bubba at her party’s inflamed left-wing activists, who hate those very financiers and their views on trade, among many other things.
The Clinton campaign’s predicament was captured in microcosm by spokesman Brian Fallon. In September 2015, he worried about an op-ed attacking the Keystone Pipeline that, he notes, had already been extensively edited and re-edited. As secretary of state, Clinton had, reasonably enough, indicated she’d likely support the pipeline, and now she was coming out against it. Will her newly aggressive opposition, Fallon wondered, “be greeted cynically and perhaps as part of some manufactured attempt to project sincerity?”
Yeah, probably — like much of what she says and does. Such was Clinton’s manifest weakness in March 2016 that a friendly liberal columnist sent a worried e-mail to John Podesta. “Right now,” the columnist warned, “I am petrified that Hillary is almost totally dependent on Republicans nominating Trump.” Sounds right. It always pays to be lucky, rather than good — or sincere.
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