HEAVY LIFT
Hil lowers expectations for N.H.
A DEFEATED-SOUNDING Hillary Clinton admitted Sunday that her chances of winning the pivotal New Hampshire primary on Tuesday are slim to none.
When the candidate was asked whether she could win the primary — which polls heavily favor Bernie Sanders to win — Clinton answered grimly.
“I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m just going to work as hard as I can,” she said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
“I don’t know what’s going to happen. I know I’m behind. But I am in very good spirits about that because I love the process.”
The latest Real Clear Politics average of recent polls shows Sanders over Clinton, 53.6% to 40.4%. Clinton, although still seen as the race’s front-runner, barely squeezed by Sanders in last week’s Iowa caucuses, which has upped the amount of confrontational rhetoric between the two candidates.
On Sunday, Clinton blasted Sanders’ lack of preparedness whenit comes to foreign policy.
“There really isn’t any kind of foreign policy network that is supporting and advising Sen. Sanders,” she said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “I’ll let him speak for himself.”
“I think that what’s important is this job requires you to be ready in all aspects of it on the first day and we know we got a particularly complex world right now and the President’s not going to have the time,” she added.
Moments later, Sanders was asked by “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd if he had recruited any consultants to advise him on foreign policy, and the Vermont senator stumbled.
“We have met recently with peo- ple like Larry Korb, who actually worked in the Reagan administration,” Sanders said. “We’ve talked to people like Jim Zogby, talked to the people on J Street to get a broad perspective of the Middle East.”
But Korb, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress think tank, told Politico last week that he had only met with the Sanders campaign once. Zogby is the president of the Arab American Institute and J Street is a pro-Israeli lobbying firm.
Later, Clinton, who has come under attack from Sanders over giving lucrative paid speeches to Wall Street firms after her tenure as secretary of state, said she would release the transcripts of those speeches — but only if others running for President did the same.
“Let everybody who’s ever given a speech to any private group under any circumstances release them,” Clinton said on ABC’s “This Week.”