If Hillary Clinton runs for president, she’ll be getting a lot of help from Wall Street. But her friends and confidants there tell me she truly hasn’t decided yet.
So why is she hesitating? The big reason, according to these sources, has to do with the dude who occupies the Oval Office now.
Barack Obama’s rapidly disintegrating presidency — and the chance it will get even worse — is Clinton’s top worry these days as she weighs whether she’ll run, and can win, in 2016, these folks say.
Of course, most of Hillary’s Wall Street buddies — from Goldman’s Lloyd Blankfein to Blackrock’s Larry Fink — think she’ll end up throwing her hat into the ring. She’s being urged to take the plunge, they say, by many confidants as well as by both her husband the former president and their daughter Chelsea.
She’s said to think that former Florida ex-Gov. Jeb Bush, with his moderate-to-conservative track record and broad appeal to Hispanics, would be a difficult foe in a general election (even with that last name), but that Republican infighting might well produce a much weaker candidate, someone who appeals to right-wing Tea Partiers and almost no one else.
Age is another cause for doubt: Clinton would be nearly 70 if she took office — but that’s still younger than Ronald Reagan when he took the oath, and 70 isn’t as old as it was then, either. (The new 60? 50?) Plus, despite rumors about health problems, people who know her say they believe Hillary is healthy enough to withstand the grind of campaigning.
No, apparently the big risk she sees is the potential taint of her old boss, President Obama.
This goes beyond the continued unpopularity of ObamaCare, even though she’s tied to that albatross not just by Democratic Party political realities by also by her push for a similarly unpopular health system during her husband’s presidency.
It even goes beyond the failures of Obama’s foreign policy — though of course Hillary, as his secretary of state for his first four years, also gets tainted not just by the Benghazi tragedy but the country’s weak standing throughout the world.
No: Her biggest fear, I’m told, is that the Obama economy gets even worse.
She knows economic recoveries (even ones as weak as the one Obama fomented with ObamaCare, higher taxes and his attacks on business) run in cycles, which often last about seven years. In other words, it could turn sharply down just in time to leave her holding the bag.
“If you ask Hillary what she really fears, it’s that in a year or so, when she’s running, that Obama will be so unpopular that no one wants any Democrat as president,” said one Wall Street executive who knows the former first lady. “That doesn’t mean she won’t run — she’s human and when so many people urge you to do something, you often do it. But that doesn’t mean she will win.”
Hillary’s fear of being stained by Obamanomics isn’t just her own; it reflects a broad-based critique of the Obama presidency you hear muttered at Washington and New York cocktail parties where liberal elites (i.e., her Wall Street supporters) often congregate.
On the other hand, Republicans have a way of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory; who knows who they’ll nominate in 2016.
And time is on Hillary’s side as long as the economy doesn’t crater. She has a formidable campaign and fund-raising apparatus ready at a moment’s notice — money will be there and her celebrity isn’t going away.
One test she’ll be looking at, I’m told, is how her new memoir, due out in June, gets received. If the book tour goes well, she’s even more likely to jump in.
But count me as skeptical that she will run — and even more skeptical that, if she does run, she wins. Because, based on everything she’s telling people about the problems of inheriting the Democratic Party from President Obama, even she’s skeptical of her chances.
Charles Gasparino is a Fox Business Network senior correspondent.