Hillary Clinton is having a rough week.
The presumptive Democratic candidate is still well in the lead for the nomination, hundreds of delegates ahead of Bernie Sanders. Her margin of victory, however, is narrowing with a string of losses to Sanders. And delegates aren’t the only thing she’s losing: Her patience is also fraying, as she “feels the Bern.”
Last week, Hillary Clinton lost her temper two separate times at the same campaign stop, heckling Bernie supporters as they were removed from her speech at SUNY Purchase College in New York, and then lecturing a Greenpeace activist, with a full-on finger wag, over the Sanders campaign “lying” about her record of support from oil and gas companies:
In fairness to Hillary, her most recent big-money fundraiser was actually with banking executives and George Clooney, not direct employees of Big Oil, and while she’s taken big bucks from fossil fuel backers, none of it has come in the form of a check directly from an energy corporation.
But regardless of whether the Sanders supporters’ allegations have merit, they certainly do seem to be eating away at Hillary Clinton. Sanders has, of course, become more aggressive in recent days, questioning Hillary’s qualifications to be President, demanding she apologize for supporting the Iraq war, and, maybe most bizarrely, accusing Hillary of tearing apart the Democratic party to satisfy her own ambitions.
But Clinton hasn’t responded with the trademark “cool” she insists is as much a part of the Hillary Clinton package as a closet full of pantsuits. Responding to Sanders’ attack on her ambition, Hillary Clinton was anything but calm and collected: she quite literally cackled as CNN anchor Chris Cuomo asked her about the incident. A great moment for GIF creation certainly, but not the most Presidential moment for the Clinton campaign.
Hillary Clinton will need to compose herself if she intends on reversing her course of losses before Bernie Sanders, whose ability to express his political positions is juvenile at best, catches up. She’s being held aloft by Democratic Superdelegates, but the next several contests will put the campaign in unfriendly territory—namely, California—and she’s lost four of the last five primaries. A few deep breaths will be very necessary if she doesn’t want to Bern out.
