She Must Make Better Speeches in Private

The conventions are over, including the Democrats' one in Philadelphia.  I assume it's over, because I couldn't actually being myself to watch very much of it.  I had enjoyed my dinners last week and wished to digest them peacefully.  That is typically incompatible with listening to leftists speaking.

Of course, I did tape-delay Hillary Clinton's acceptance speech because eventually I was going to have to write about it.

To no one's surprise, the usual terms like "home run" and "hit it out of the park" were left at home, even by the slavering press, whose general consensus was that it was at best the fifth best of all the longer speeches during the week, including ranked as being behind that of the wife of the president, Michelle Obama.  When you can't speak more effectively than a non-professional non-politician when doing the speech of your life, well, that can be a problem.

Fifth best of the longer speeches.  Yuk.  And that is today's point.

Hillary Clinton is still the darling of Wall Street, at least in the sense that to date she has gotten just short of $50 million in recent campaign contributions from hedge-fund managers alone.  Much, most or all of that has been given since the convention, meaning after Bernie Sanders endorsed her and she could comfortably take those bucks without risking even more convention protests.

Note -- By contrast, hedge-fund managers have given Donald Trump's campaign less than $50,000.  But I digress, I guess.

But even the hedge-fund managers' contributions are not so much the topic as this one -- Hillary Clinton was paid literally hundreds of thousands of dollars per speech while not in office, to make a bunch of speeches to Wall Street banks and financial institutions like Goldman Sachs.  For some, she was paid more than a half-million, each.  [While she was actually in office, Bill was the one making the paid speeches.  Even the terminally corrupt have their limits.]

So I was cogitating about the apparent disconnect last night, and a piece just sort of wrote itself thereafter.  Here we have Wall Street banks willing to pay gargantuan sums to Hillary Clinton for speeches.  I could retire on the fee for just one of them (in case they need a speaker this month).

But she isn't, apparently, very good at it.  Not only was hers far from the best speech of the convention, but based on the picture at right, taken during her oration, she couldn't even make her husband stay awake for it (and her running mate looks a bit numb as well).

This was the one time she needed to be compelling as a speaker, and she was mediocre.  Her words needed to be inspiring and well-presented, and she put part of the world to sleep, and made the ears of the rest bleed with that awful delivery and grating voice.  Clearly this is not her skill set.  We get it.

So please, please tell me this.  If she is indeed not a good speaker, and she obviously is not, then why the Heck were Wall Street bankers and hedge fund managers lined up to pay her hundreds of thousands per speech?  It has to be the content, right, that she had great things to say to them?

But if those "great things" were so great, apparently they were not great enough for Hillary to have wanted anyone outside the room ever to know what they were.  Because, as well-reported, her demands for the privilege of being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to speak for the hedge-fund types included a paid stenographer providing the transcripts only to her, and forbidding anyone in the room from recording the speech.

And even today, she refuses to allow a word of what she said to be released to the public.  So here's what we have:
- Hillary makes the most important speech of her life at the DNC, which goes pffft.
- The world agrees that her speaking is brutal
- Hillary gets paid huge speechifying fees to speak to Wall Street banks and hedge funds.
- Hillary won't let a word of those speeches go public.

So we are left with two choices.  Perhaps she had some amazing insight for the Wall Street types that, even with her poor speaking skills, they were willing to pay megabucks to hear from her.

Yeah, no.

More likely, approaching metaphysical certitude, the fat fees were a quid pro quo, a personal donation disguised as a speaking fee, a direct payment to Clinton, Inc. to ensure that the powers that be in Washington will ensure that the hedgies will continue their favored treatment in the tax code and elsewhere in the regulatory bureaucracy.

It is no wonder that Wall Street is so ready to cough up $50 million in a few days, to try to persuade the nation to choke down the prospect of Hillary Clinton as a president.  If they're ready to sign that much in donation checks, and pay that much to her personally disguised as speaking fees for what cannot possibly be any great, inspiring oration, you have to figure she's worth billions to them in office.

Crooked, crooked, crooked.  The system, the bankers and, the saddest of all, Hillary Clinton.  Personally, I have had it with the corruption and the despicable links between the vested few and the crooked in politics, and it starts with Mrs. Clinton.

Poor speaker, but paid millions to speak.  You connect the dots.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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