When Warren was asked what she made of Clinton's 'dead broke' remarks:

[karynnj]

79. This likely is the kindest response she could make

Clinton's comments were gaffes - even if their combined debts were greater than their assets when they left the White House. I assume these were comments to define herself as one "of us". It is a response to an American meme that they want Presidents who are like them.

I would hope that people would see they need leaders who are better than them - smarter, more creative, more eloquent and articulate, with whatever it is that makes someone a calm, secure leader who has the courage to face problems, the honesty to speak the truth, the self confidence to seek the smartest people as experts and the intelligence to listen to their various advice and make sensible action plans. Whether they used those very skills to make money before they entered public life or if they were born to money, it really shouldn't matter.

What hurts here is NOT that Hillary and Bill Clinton - for the first time in their life - used the skills that made him President in the first place, to make a huge amount of money through books and speeches, but that it is insulting to anyone who ever really did have major money problems - where everything they could think to do to raise money was inadequate. At the point they left the WH, she had an $8 million advance. I have no idea how much of that was upfront, but some of it was. In addition, Bill would soon have a book contract too. These alone likely covered the huge debts they had. The average dead broke person had no such opportunity.

I suspect the root of this is that Bill Clinton was genuinely poor ND Hillary was middle class growing up. They had to feel poor at Yale, where many classmates were from families that had money for generations. However, neither choose the easy get rich immediately route. They went to Arkansas and he went into public service. (Consider that BC could easily have made a John Edwards type law career.) From the time they left law school - through the years in the WH, there was never a point that making money was their goal.

From that perspective, when looking back to 2000 - it is easy to see how - in retrospect she saw them as having accumulated no financial assets. True, if considered narrowly, but obviously the potential gains were astronomical and, at least for teh books, something of undeniable value for history and the country. Their autobiographies are important to understanding that time.