At Chappaqua, Hillary is idling an evening.  Then she picks up a copy of Politico.  She gets to the end of Dylan Byers’ column and starts to boil.  Byers quotes New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait, who said, “I'm sure they [the Clintons] don’t like having a liberal criticize them.  It might, in some very marginal way, help open up more space for a Democratic challenger." 

Chait is a liberal writing for the liberal New York Magazine.  Liberals, you’d guess, would rally around the Democrats’ presumed presidential nominee.  But they aren’t.  They haven’t been.  The left’s goal is as it has been: bag Hillary.  Elizabeth Warren is the left’s beau ideal (except for Howard Dean, who’s in the Clintons’ pocket). 

Peter Schweizer’s book, Clinton Cash, is a godsend to the left.  As Byers’ points out, mainstream publications “The New York Times, POLITICO, The Washington Post, Reuters, Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal have all published reports on such possible connections” [to alleged wrong-doing], thanks to Schweizer. 

Chait’s comment refers to the column he wrote last week in New York Magazine critical of Bill Clinton’s post-presidency.  According to Chait, since leaving the White House, the Clintons are “best-case scenario” a whoppingly “disorganized and greedy” pair.  The worst-case, which Chait doesn’t state explicitly, is that the Clintons’ conduct is criminal.  Conduct pertaining to the Clinton’s foundations imbroglio, that is.  But Chait’s inference is damning enough.

High profile MSM outlets breaking ranks means that without them, it’s tougher for Hillary’s camp to smear Schweizer as a conservative crank grinding an axe.

From Byers’ column:

In the eyes of my Democratic strategist [his source], this damning critique "gives a VERY strong retort to the argument that the New Yorker said they were going to push... which is that this is a Fox News/Koch brothers-pushed story."      

Rest assured, the Clinton machine is working overtime to bury the bothersome reporting.  We can assume Bill, Hill, Lanny Davis, and other henchmen are working the phones, cajoling, pleading, strong-arming, wheedling, and bribing to get the media to desist and train its guns on Schweizer’s exposé. 

The stakes are high for Bill and his bride.  Further negative news coverage leads to more than Hillary losing the Democratic presidential nod.  It could lead to criminal difficulties.  The adverse publicity certainly puts a serious crimp in the Clintons’ money-making.  Money and power are what get the Clintons up and out of their respective beds mornings.  (Then, again, there’s always a junket to Orgy Island that motivates Bill, but…) 

Don’t discount the possibility of criminal trouble for the Clintons, whose foundations carry the heavy stink of influence-peddling and misappropriation of funds, at least.  Keep in mind that Barack Obama is no fan of the Clintons.  Obama wants a left-wing successor who carries on his work of “transforming” America.   Hill and Bill are exclusively about… Hill and Bill.  Obama may unleash his Justice Department, though there’s plenty of political calculation that goes into doing so.  None of Hillary’s shenanigans while Secretary of State can lead back to the White House.  If so, Obama shoots himself in the foot by siccing DOJ’s dogs on the Clintons.  Nonetheless, Obama, via Valerie Jarrett and others, may have covertly helped crack an MSM (The Wall Street Journal excepted) that rarely fires on Democrats.   

The conventional wisdom about Hillary’s run for the White House is two-fold.  One is that the Clintons’ money and connections make her unsinkable (so was the Titanic).  The Democratic establishment, rather than the left, is for her (actually, for the big paydays sycophantic Democrats will make off her campaign and the access to power they’ll gain if Hillary wins).     

The reported claim that Hillary intends to raise $2.5 billion for her presidential bid has, to date, intimated potential competitors (except Martin O’Malley, whose willingness to contest Hillary might payoff smartly in the coming months).  How does Schweizer’s book and the initial negative MSM coverage of Clinton wrongdoing impact Hillary’s fundraising? 

As Thomas Lifson wrote for Monday’s American Thinker:

The most serious threat yet to Hillary Clinton’s planned cakewalk to the presidency is finally being spoken about in public. Donors, observing that donations to Team Clinton are now under scrutiny as possible bribes, are thinking twice about investing in a candidacy that used to be seen as inevitable. Usually, such doubts are left unspoken in public. But now, a top fundraiser is obliquely expressing his fears and his plans to suspend fundraising.

The Clinton foundations’ scandal is just starting.  More revelations – or more substantiations of wrongdoing – could dry up Clinton money, pronto. 

The second bit of CW is that the Democrats’ bench is bare.  Not so.  O’Malley’s in the game already.  Elizabeth Warren – the left’s darling – waits in the wings, with efforts ongoing by supporters to make her the Democrats’ nominee.  Former senator Jim Webb is skulking around.  Kentucky governor Steve Beshear has been talked about.  There’s Bernie Sanders, for comic relief.  And there are other, younger Democrats (dark horses, indeed) who might leap in if Hillary looks like a goner.

Republicans dismiss O’Malley and Warren, particularly, at their own peril.  The GOP and Democrats begin the 2016 presidential contest with most states divided between them (with an edge to the Democrats in the Electoral College).  There are a handful of battleground states where the 2016 contest will be decided.  

The Democrats learned long ago the hard way about the need to aggressively package their party’s nominee as a centrist.  Either O’Malley or Warren, with the help of the MSM, legions of battle-tested consultants, the entertainment industry, and social media, will be offered to critical swing voters in battleground states as a moderate.  Can they make the sale?  Depends on how skilled and aggressive Republicans are in defining O’Malley or Warren first.  

The deep, dark secret is that the left doesn’t trust Hillary for many of the same reasons that the right doesn’t trust her.  The left doesn’t share John Boehner’s bizarre, historically out of context assessment that the Clintons are “good people.”  That doesn’t mean that if Hillary manages to survive the Clinton foundations’ scandal – and who knows what other troubles ahead – and secures the nomination that the left won’t close ranks around her.  It will, because a thoroughly corrupt, self-serving, temperamental, and unreliably leftist Hillary is better than any Republican alternative.  The left plays politics to win and won’t allow the perfect to be the enemy of the hardly acceptable. 

But there’s a lot of asphalt to travel between now and November 2016.  The brewing Clinton foundations’ scandal gives new impetus to the left’s heretofore low key “Get Hillary” campaign.  Don’t bet against Saul Alinsky’s acolytes getting their gal.