Is Hillary Clinton Too Rich?

Does the Clintons’ wealth pose a danger to Hillary Clinton’s eventual bid for the White House? Two recent articles in The Washington Post are like canaries in a mine, trying to detect whether Republicans will portray the former secretary of state the way Barack Obama depicted Mitt Romney during the 2012 campaign, as a super-rich individual without any sense of the realities facing ordinary Americans. “Last time I actually drove a car myself was 1996,” Hillary confessed in a recent interview. Since Bill’s election in 1992, the former first lady, who later became a senator representing New York state, then secretary of state, has lived in a bubble far removed from the realities of everyday life. Although she tried not to show it in an interview with The Guardian, Hillary is definitely part of the 1 percent.

Between January 2001 and January 2013, Bill Clinton received $104.9 million for speaking engagements. He gave 542 speeches, to be exact, for which he is sometimes paid up to $700,000. Hillary, who received an $8 million advance for her last book — the amount of the advance for her latest book, “Hard Choices,” hasn’t been revealed — receives $200,000 per speech. The Clinton family, which once had close to $10 million in debt mainly due to legal fees for lawyers defending them during Bill’s presidency, is now free from want. Hillary and Bill own two houses, one in the U.S. capital, worth $5 million, and another in a New York suburb, worth an estimated $1.8 million. And that’s not even counting Chelsea, their daughter, an NBC employee who makes $600,000 per year and who bought an apartment in Manhattan with her husband for $10.5 million. It’s difficult for her to explain that she isn’t “truly well off,” as Hillary said in her interview with The Guardian.

Hillary runs two risks: Like George Bush Sr., who marveled at the scanner at the supermarket checkout and didn’t know the price of milk, Hillary herself has not gone grocery shopping since her days of working as a lawyer at the Rose Law Firm in Arkansas.

On the other hand, even if Americans respect those who become wealthy from their work, they’ll still find it hard to understand how someone could receive a check for $200,000 for an hour-long speech.

If she decides to try for the White House, Hillary would do well to study Mitt Romney’s campaign. That would help her avoid many disappointments.