WHAT TROUBLE? CLINTON HAS EARLY LOCK ON IOWA CAUCUS, QUINNIPIAC UNIVERSITY POLL FINDS

[karynnj]

47. It is always the FRONTRUNNER who gets bashed

Whether HRC, whether Dean, whether Gore, whether Kerry, whether Obama -- at the time someone becomes the frontrunner, they get bashed usually by the other opponents, their supporters and the media.

Not to mention, I think Clinton/the State Department controlled when the email story came out. It is good that it came out long before the primaries and AFTER the State Department received the emails. This story coming out was not "bashing". At worst, Clinton got caught at a point where standards were changing towards transparency and she had actually moved in the opposite direction. (It may be that the strongest consequences were to the current State Department having to prepare 55000 pages of email for public viewing -- a huge task that - no matter how conscientiously they do will be said to have taken too long and they risk missing some things that should have been redacted. The consequences to HRC appear to be a few weeks of bad PR that she easily has overcome. )

As to the Clinton cash stories, the fact that the book has a right wing writer actually inoculates her to some degree from any charges that she did not live by her agreement to Obama.

Both these issues have some real roots - and they may have both come out at a time and in ways that minimizes their impact. This is not huge parts of the media intentionally misinterpreting to make a candidate look egomaniacal or a liar - like they did to Gore, whose committee in the House did fund the ARPA net that became the internet. This was not the media condoning a character assassination for months while the public record was 100% in the nominee's favor - as happened to John Kerry.