Achilles heels? Scandals, gaffes could haunt Hillary

WASHINGTON (AFP) — Hillary Clinton looks ahead to 2016 as the year Americans may finally elect their first- ever female president, but her past is freighted with blemishes and gaffes that could compromise if not sink her campaign.

Clinton intends to draw on her wealth of experience as first lady, US senator and globe-trotting secretary of state to convince voters she is the best person for the job.

But the Republican National Committee is already labeling her past as a “decades-long record of secrecy and scandal.” Here’s a look:

Former US president Bill Clinton’s sexual indiscretions have long dogged the superstar Democratic couple.

Arkansas employee Paula Jones sued Clinton for sexual harassment. The president testified in 1998 that he had intimate relations with former reporter Gennifer Flowers.

Years earlier, he had sat next to Hillary and insisted on CBS’s “60 Minutes” that accusations of a Clinton-Flowers affair were false.

But the truly explosive scandal was the relationship Bill had with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, and the subsequent December 1998 impeachment of Clinton by the House of Representatives for perjury and obstructing a federal investigation.

He was acquitted by the Senate, but the episode is a scab that might be peeled back over the next 18 months.

“It’s not Hillary’s fault,” Republican Senator Rand Paul, himself a likely presidential candidate, said last year about Bill’s trysts.

But Paul said the affair should now be fair game, and warned of the damage of sending a philanderer back to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue as first husband.

Arkansas was a mixed blessing for the Clintons. They launched their political dynasty there, but it was also scene of a land-development scandal involving the Clintons while Bill was governor.

He and Hillary teamed up with Whitewater Development Corporation partners Jim and Susan McDougal on a business venture that soured in the 1980s. Amid disputes over loans, shady deals and charges of fraud, the McDougals went to jail.

The Clintons were never prosecuted, but the name Whitewater could serve as a dog whistle for conservatives eager to dredge up the 1990s controversies in Clintonland.