Two New Hampshire Democratic women are bringing in the big gun to help pump up their support among hardcore voters:
Former President Bill Clinton.
The 42nd president will be in Nashua Friday evening for a rally where voters can “hear from President Clinton about the stakes of this election and how you can help ensure Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, Joyce Craig, Maggie Goodlander, and Democrats up and down the ballot win on November 5!”
Former Manchester Mayor Joyce Craig is the Democratic nominee for governor. Maggie Goodlander is the party’s candidate in the Second Congressional District, which includes her hometown of Nashua.
Will the two Democratic women connect with Clinton in Nashua? Neither campaign would respond when asked by NHJournal, and there is no mention of it in their social media.
Clinton has a long and storied history in New Hampshire. In 1992, Granite State Democrats gave him the second-place finish in the First in the Nation presidential primary he needed, making him the “Comeback Kid,” and keeping him in the race.
In 2016, the state Democratic Party renamed its traditional Jefferson-Jackson fundraising dinner the Kennedy-Clinton dinner, after Clinton and fellow former president John F. Kennedy.
But less than two years later, the party quietly dropped Clinton and Kennedy, changing the name to the Eleanor Roosevelt Dinner.
Why? Under pressure from Democratic women.
A day before the 2017 Kennedy-Clinton event, The New York Times asked U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) if she thought the dinner’s namesake should have resigned from the presidency after taking advantage of his 22-year-old intern Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office.
“Yes, I think that is the appropriate response,” said Gillibrand, who would go on to author the “Me Too Congress Act” to address sexual misconduct in Washington, D.C. politics.
Former New Hampshire state party chair Kathy Sullivan reportedly opposed the idea of naming the dinner after Clinton and his fellow womanizer Kennedy from the beginning. Asked about a name change at the 2017 event, Sullivan said, “It’s a good discussion to have. Because I think there’s behavior that was not acceptable ever, but was kept quiet, or people just kind of ignored.”
Sullivan urged the Clinton and Kennedy names be dropped that very night. After a group of angry women staged a protest at a Democratic Party gathering a few weeks later, the decision was made to dump them.
Asked if she plans to attend the Nashua rally with Clinton, Sullivan declined to respond.
Clinton’s treatment of women — particularly women over whom he had economic or political power — was not secret in 2016 and it’s still not today. Multiple documentaries and reality-based TV shows have been produced recounting his sexual bullying of state employee Paula Jones in an Arkansas hotel room when he was governor, his alleged rape of Juanita Broaddrick, and his relationship with Lewinsky.
Bronwyn Sims at the Boston Women’s March
“As a New Hampshire woman, I find it demeaning that these candidates would campaign with Bill Clinton, given his history of exploiting women,” said Bronwyn Sims of Nelson, N.H. “I do not consider him to be a trustworthy advocate for women.”
A former Bernie Sanders supporter, Sims is state party chair of The WalkAway Campaign, a grassroots movement of progressives who’ve left the Democratic Party. The organization is dedicated to “informing voters about the dangers of the left-wing Democrat agenda and the importance of protecting true democracy.”
None of the New Hampshire Democratic women holding public office contacted by NHJournal about Clinton, his legacy, and the #MeToo movement would speak on the record.
A group of New Hampshire GOP women, including state Republican National Committeewoman Mary Jane Beauregard, plan to hold a press event at Nashua City Hall a few hours before Clinton’s scheduled arrival.
“Bill Clinton’s involvement in campaigning for Kamala Harris and Joyce Craig is unlikely to resonate with voters, and rightfully so,” Beauregard said. “His record of mistreating women, alongside Hillary Clinton’s history, should disqualify him from being taken seriously in any political context.”
Goodlander has ties to both Bill and Hillary Clinton. They both attended her 2015 wedding to current Biden administration National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan.
And during the 1992 election, Goodlander’s mother, Betty Tamposi, lost her job in the George H.W. Bush administration over her questionable handling of Bill Clinton’s passport records. (Clinton’s student travel and draft record from the Vietnam War era were politically-sensitive topics at the time.)
The Bill Clinton scandal was eventually resolved after he agreed to a deal in which he was found in civil contempt of court for giving misleading testimony in the Paula Jones case, paid a $90,000 fine, and his law license was suspended.
“I find it ironic, all the names they’ve called Donald Trump, yet they have no problem campaigning with the ultimate misogynist and a man who abused his power to gain favors with women,” said former GOP House Speaker Pro Tempore Kimberly Rice (R-Hudson).
“I wouldn’t campaign with him,” added former state GOP vice chair Pamela Tucker.
In addition to stumping in a state where his name was stripped from the fundraising dinner, Clinton is encountering additional problems on the Harris campaign trail.
The former president recently suggested that Biden-Harris border policies may have led to the murder of Laken Riley at the hands of an illegal immigrant.
“You got a case in Georgia not very long ago, didn’t you, they made an ad about it, a young woman who had been killed by an immigrant. Yeah, well if they’d all been properly vetted that probably wouldn’t have happened,” Clinton said.
On Thursday, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) strongly condemned what it called his “insulting and Islamophobic” attempt to “justify the Israeli government’s ongoing attacks on Palestinian civilians in Gaza.”
“Prominent leaders like Bill Clinton should be upholding Palestinian human rights, not rationalizing war crimes against Palestinian civilians,” said CAIR Government Affairs Director Robert S. McCaw.
And while campaigning in Michigan Wednesday, Clinton appeared to admit that the economy was better during the Trump administration than it is today.
“I don’t think it’s right to say that people have to vote for Donald Trump because the economy was better… I don’t believe that,” Clinton told the crowd at a Harris event.
Granite State Republicans note Clinton is just the latest high-profile Democrat to visit what the Harris campaign says is a “safe state” for Democrats. Harris, former President Joe Biden, and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) have all come to New Hampshire to campaign.
