All the attention focused on New York real estate developer Donald Trump's presidential run is almost enough to make people forget the Democrats are having a primary contest of their own that is producing surprising results.

Sure, Trump and the outrageous statements that have turned his outsider candidacy into a first-place bid for the nomination make for good headlines. That former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is barely ahead of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders among delegates won in primaries and caucuses is as interesting, probably more so – or at least it should be. When the campaign started, Clinton was not only the presumed favorite among all the potential candidates, she was the 900 lb. gorilla. She was going to dominate the race from start to finish and no one was supposed to be able to come close.

Problems she has largely created for herself, however, have rendered that assessment moot. If it were not for her prodigious lead among the so-called "superdelegates" to the Democratic National Convention the former first lady's campaign would be in real trouble.

How she and her team could have so badly misjudged the tenor of the times and the mood of the electorate is anybody's guess. It might just be they've spent too much time inside the beltway and in places like Chappaqua, New York – the former first couple's upscale post-presidential community of choice. It's a nice place to live but hardly representative of the middle American voter she purports to represent in her speeches and campaign pleadings.

It's also not that far removed from Greenwich, Connecticut, home to many of the hedge-fund billionaires her opponent in the primary likes to criticize with such force, or from New York City and Wall Street, not too long ago ground zero for the Occupy Movement's protests against income inequality and corporate greed.

How she could have missed all this is a mystery; yet she keeps playing into the hands of those who believe her connections to corporate America, Wall Street and the big financial firms are akin to her sleeping with the enemy. It's as though her current lead among all delegates going to the party's Philadelphia convention has given her a tin ear unable to hear the complaints of the activist wing she needs to win the nation's highest office.

A case in point, the kerfuffle she has created by rejecting requests to release the transcripts of speeches she made to representatives of big banks and brokerage businesses after she left the Obama administration, remarks for which she was reportedly very well compensated. Some in her party, mostly those whose work in the fields of politics is on behalf of Sen. Bernie Sanders, want to know what she said. By refusing to tell she's added considerably to the sense she has something to hide, that she's made promises to the insiders about what she'd do as president she doesn't want anyone to know about.

Her latest response to these requests – that she'll release the transcripts of her speeches when the Republicans running for president release theirs – is a not-to-clever feint more appropriate for the schoolyard than the presidential arena. It's not likely to prove effective by any measure.

It's possible there's another explanation, one that most professional speechwriters and political aides would immediately recognize as coming from real life, but which Clinton does not want anyone to know. No matter how much she was paid to speak to these groups and to these corporate and financial leaders and other "fat cats," in all likelihood she, with a few minor deviations here and there to account for who was in the room and what was out there in the global ether, gave pretty much the same speech most every single time.

In politics this is no sin; in fact, it's an asset having someone who can remain on message and isn't saying something different to every group they address. That can cause conflicts and problems, something her former president husband's handlers knew all too well. He spoke extemporaneously all too often, tailoring his remarks so that everyone in the room knew he had their sympathy or, as it was common to say at the time, "felt their pain." Nevertheless, the release of 15 or 50 or 100 speeches all at once, all of which are more or less identical, could be something of an embarrassment – especially if they are full of boilerplate and bromides – because of they way they might suggest a lack of intellectual depth.