Marc Cooper over at HuffPo asks the same question my mom asked me yesterday:
Where did Hillary get $5 million bucks to loan herself?
And he points out, this question is one that the GOP will be asking. You may remember, they like digging into the lives of the Clintons, and sometimes they find some dirt there. Cooper:
Now that's what one might call a heckuva coincidence. A handful of weeks ago, Bill Clinton disentangles his investment partnership with billionaire Ron Burkle, producing an estimated $20 million windfall. And now we learn that the suddenly flush Clintons are loaning Hillary's campaign $5 million from their joint assets to bridge it through a funding rough patch.
Talk about windfalls. This is a veritable bonanza not only for enterprising reporters and snoopy researchers, but also for any Republican candidate that could potentially face Hillary in November -- if she wins the nomination. That is, if she doesn't first drown in a sea of sleaze of her own making.
It puts front and center the question of just how rich are the Clintons, and how did they get so rich? Current estimates of their joint wealth range from $10 million up to $50 million or more, a long way to come from when they first got married and they struggled to make the $14,000 mortgage on their first modest Arkansas home.
Quite a nice pay-off for a supposed career of 35 years, as Hillary repeats every day, "working to bring positive change to people's lives." While Clinton touts her decision to come out of law school and work not for Wall Street but rather for the Children's Defense Fund, the truth is that she spent only a year there. (And then omitted her mentor Marian Wright Edelman from among the 400 others she mentions in the acknowledgemets of her autobiography because Edelman had broken with her when Bill Clinton abolished the federal welfare saftey net in 1996).
For half of her professional career Clinton really worked not at all for The Little People, but rather for Arkansas'most elite business-connected law firm, representing big corporations and serving on their boards.
Ross Perot isn't running this year. Unless he's wearing a John McCain mask that is. And the crappy incumbent isn't on the ballot. This is not Bill Clinton's election. From a political-historical viewpoint, Hillary is an ideal nominee only if your name is Karl Rove.