Like old times: Hillary Clinton campaigns for Donna Shalala in South Florida
In an event that seems like a reprise of the 1990s, former first lady Hillary Clinton will join former Clinton Cabinet Secretary Donna Shalala Wednesday at a fundraiser for Shalala’s congressional campaign. “Hillary Rodham Clinton Joins Donna Shalala in South Florida,” reads the press release from the Democratic campaign for the 27th Congressional District of Florida, announcing the event at the Coral Gables Woman’s Club.
Shalala is running for office for the first time at the age of 77, after a career as an educator and in posts she was appointed to by the Clintons. She was secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services from 1993-2001, and ran the Clinton Foundation for two years starting in 2015.
Although Hillary Clinton is not on any ballot this election cycle, she is a presence. An effective fundraiser for Democrats — appearing at events in San Francisco, Chicago and New York in recent months — she has also raised enormous sums for the Republicans, albeit inadvertently. As soon as she first said she might campaign during the midterms the Republican National Campaign Committee released digital ads of her infamous characterization of some Trump supporters as “deplorable” and “backwards.”
“The longer a scandal-plagued Hillary Clinton lingers in American politics, the worse off House Democrats will be,” Jesse Hunt, spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee said last August. And in September, a Gallup poll found that her favorable rating nationwide was just 36 percent, lower than when she was a candidate.
Fear of backlash led New York Times editorial board member Michelle Cottle to warn that Clinton’s involvement was “likely to electrify the Republican base, in whose collective lizard brain Mrs. Clinton still looms large — the ultimate boogeyman to be invoked whenever a Republican politician is having trouble exciting his constituents.”
But Shalala spokesman Mike Hernandez says that the former Democratic presidential nominee’s presence will be nothing but a boon for Shalala, who is running against TV journalist Maria Elvira Salazar in a heavily Cuban-American district that covers Miami, Miami Beach and cities to the south. Democrats see it as a chance to flip a House seat in a district that Clinton won by 20 points. But it also elected a Republican to Congress, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, who is retiring after nearly two decades in office.
Clinton “is very popular with voters in the district still,” Hernandez says. “More importantly she has been friends with Donna Shalala for 45 years,” since well before Bill Clinton took office, when Shalala and Hillary Clinton served together on the board of the Children’s Defense Fund.
Another Clinton ally, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, is also taking part in the fundraiser. Wasserman Schultz resigned as chair of the Democratic Party in July 2016, after Wikileaks released hacked emails that showed her favoring Clinton over her primary rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders.
The support, in effect, seems as much personal as political. Late this past summer, Shalala showed a Washington Post reporter a text from Clinton of the Clintons’ two dogs wearing bibs that said “Vote for Shalala.” And Shalala said she had no hesitation about being identified with the Clintons — although at that point she said she did not plan to have either campaign for her.
“I have no problem defending the Clinton Foundation or defending the magnificent work it does around the world, or defending my past,” Shalala said. “And if they wanna run against me on that, bring it on.”
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