-By Warner Todd Huston
A Clinton extended family member, Marjorie Margolies–the mother of Chelsea Clinton’s husband–was running for Congress in a safe Democrat district in Pennsylvania. Everyone expected her to just waltz into Congress but shockingly she got crushed by a lesser known primary challenger.
Margolies had a lot of things going for her, all of which seemed to assure that she was a shoo in. She was once a Congresswoman, she is Chelsea Clinton’s mother-in-law and she had both Bill and Hillary fly in to her district and campaign for her. She is also a “she,” and was being challenged in the Democrat primary by a white man. That alone would have seemed to put her over the edge, war on women wise.
But it was the Clinton connection that everyone thought would be the number one winning point. Bill and Hillary held campaign fundraisers for Margolies and Bill sent out a robo call on her behalf.
Back during her single term in Congress in 1993, Margolies was a “yes” vote for Clinton’s tax increases, something that Bill celebrated on the robo call saying her vote “reversed trickle-down economics and set the country on the longest peacetime expansion in history–one that all Americans participated in.”
This district is solidly Democrat so it isn’t likely that the Republican challenger, Dee Adcock, can grab this open seat.
Margolies was faced with a young, 37-year-old state legislator named Brendan Boyle.
As my friend John Fund reports:
Boyle won because he used his shoe leather and union organizers to make up for Margolies’ advantage in TV advertising. He also blunted her attacks on his pro-life voting record in the legislature. “National pro-choice groups like NARAL and EMILY’s List have no problem declaring their opposition to Brendan Boyle’s anti-choice record,” Margolies said. But Boyle explained his votes to toughen regulations on abortion clinics in the wake of the Gosnell late-term abortion scandal were appropriate, and insisted he had “evolved” into supporting Roe v. Wade. Margolies also questioned Boyle’s commitment to public education, noting that pro-charter-school and pro-voucher groups had contributed to his prior campaigns. The attacks bounced off Boyle.
Could the bloom be fully off the Clinton rose?
We may see if Hillary announces for president but this should serve as a warning to her that she cannot expect it all to be a cakewalk.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, Wizbang.com, among many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.
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