Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) reportedly was speechless for 15 seconds this week before being able to respond to a question about Hillary Clinton’s latest big-money speaking engagement.
The former First Lady and Secretary of State is scheduled to appear this coming October at a fundraiser for a foundation that promotes the University of Nevada at Las Vegas – and she’s charging a speaking fee of $225,000.
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Clinton’s office told The Washington Post that the money would go to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, the family’s non-profit global philanthropic organization; a UNLV spokesperson said Clinton’s fee is covered by private sponsorships and not public money. Still, that is a staggering amount to charge the arm of a publicly supported research institution in a state with the country’s second highest unemployment rate.
“Anything we can do to focus attention on UNLV, that’s extremely important to do, and this certainly will focus attention on UNLV, and that’s why they have these people come,” Reid finally stammered to reporters after being asked if he thought the fee was a good use of money by the foundation, according to The Las Vegas Review-Journal. He quickly added, “I didn’t have anything to do with the decision.”
This latest fee of nearly a quarter of a million dollars for what will probably be a variation of Hillary Clinton’s stump speech is further driving a narrative unwelcome to Democrats—that Hillary and Bill Clinton are raking in big bucks from mostly special interest groups after she complained to ABC’s Diane Sawyer earlier this month, “We came out of the White House not only dead broke, but in debt.”
She later tried to walk back those comments, noting on ABC’s Good Morning America, “We understand what that struggle is because we had student debts — both of us — we had to pay off, we had to work, I had a couple jobs in law school, he had lots of jobs.” She added, “We have a life experience clearly different in very dramatic ways from every American, but we also have gone through a lot of the same challenges as many people have.”
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If she runs, Hillary Clinton is considered a shoe-in for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination – although the controversy over her family’s rapid accumulation of wealth puts her squarely at the high end of the 1 percent and makes it more difficult for her to be the poster candidate for income inequality.
“If Mrs. Clinton has Democratic opposition in 2016, I could see this becoming an issue,” said Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia. “There is a strong populist faction in the party, though many in the faction have already endorsed Hillary.”