Hillary Clinton Says She'll Be Transparent When Her Opponents Are Transparent
Hillary Clinton can’t seem to get out from under a scandal involving a series of speeches she gave to Goldman Sachs employees, and she’s turned to sarcasm as a last resort.
For weeks, critics have been calling on the Democratic presidential candidate to release transcripts of the speeches, arguing that Clinton could have been promising big bank staffers that she’d go easy on them if elected president. Clinton has categorically refused, and took to ABC’s This Week on Sunday to say that she’d release them if all her rivals do the same:
“Let everybody who’s ever given a speech to any private group under any circumstances release them. We’ll all release them at the same time.”
Clinton earned about $600,000 for the speeches, and has said that she will “look into” releasing their transcripts.
Okay.....that’s a thought. It makes sense that rules should apply to everyone. The issue here, however, is not that voters want transcripts from every single speech that Clinton has given throughout the history of her political career—a demand that is as impossible as it is irrelevant. The problem, rather, is that Clinton has repeatedly been scolded for accepting large sums in campaign funds from wealthy donors, many of them with connections to Wall St., and with a vested interest in keeping the Wall St. working the way it already does now. By refusing to tell the public what she tells Goldman Sachs’ bankers in private, Clinton is leaving too much to the imagination: what could she possibly have promised bankers that is too damaging to release to her constituents? More likely than not, what we imagine is actually worse than what she actually said behind closed doors.
Clinton has noted, rightfully, that this kind of scrutiny would likely not be heaped on her if she weren’t a woman. It’s undeniable that the game is rigged against her because of gender. That being said, Democratic voters value transparency, and they already have a candidate who is giving them more of it.
