Clinton's blind spot on Wall Street could become her Achilles' heel

Darrell Delamaide | Special for USA TODAY

WASHINGTON – Hillary Clinton's blind spot on Wall Street could become her Achilles' heel if she doesn't clarify her message.

In Saturday's Democratic primary debate, Clinton responded to questions about her Wall Street ties from the CBS moderators and from her rival for the nomination, Sen. Bernie Sanders, with a cringe-worthy invocation of 9/11.

"Where were we attacked? We were attacked in downtown Manhattan where Wall Street is," Clinton floundered in a total non-sequitur to questions about campaign donations. "I did spend a whole lot of time and effort helping them rebuild. That was good for New York. It was good for the economy and it was a way to rebuke the terrorists who had attacked our country."

She seemed to be saying elliptically, though she didn't spell it out, that the reason she gets so much campaign funding from Wall Street is that as New York senator she came to the aid of her constituents in their hour of need.

It is, of course, preposterous to suggest that decades of Wall Street campaign contributions to Bill Clinton in his day and to her in two Senate and two Democratic primary campaigns for president could be pinned to this single response in 2001.

More tellingly, it shows once again that Hillary Clinton, unlike her husband, has a political tin ear for how her remarks can be perceived.

Worst of all, that tin ear shows itself most often when she becomes defensive about money and about Wall Street.

It was in response to a question last year about the Clintons collecting millions in speaking fees from Wall Street that she memorably and laughably said the couple was "dead broke" when they left the White House in 2001.

The response Saturday was a scattershot to evade the question about how she can be tough on Wall Street after accepting massive campaign donations from the banks and law firms there.

After Sanders forcefully made the point that corporate interests expect to get something for their money when they donate to a campaign, Clinton flailed: "Wait a minute. Wait a minute, he has basically used his answer to impugn my integrity. Let's be frank here."

Sanders demurred and Clinton continued her expression of outrage: "Oh, wait a minute, senator. You know, not only do I have hundreds of thousands of donors, most of them small. And I'm very proud that for the first time a majority of my donors are women, 60%."

Impugning my integrity, all my small donors, women are supporting "their" candidate – Clinton's response had everything but facing up to the influence of corporate money in politics.

Her outrage was as convincing as that of the Claude Rains character in "Casablanca" in his famous line, "I'm shocked, shocked, to find that gambling is going on in here," as the croupier slips him his winnings from the backroom casino.

When the moderators cited a Twitter comment from law professor Andy Grewal that he has "never seen a candidate invoke 9/11 to justify millions of Wall Street donations," Clinton belatedly realized that she had stepped over a line and apologized for giving the wrong impression.

The New York Times editorial board thundered that the awkward exchange, coming as the terrorist attacks in Paris had recalled the trauma of 9/11, "was at best botched rhetoric" and "at worst it was the type of cynical move that Mrs. Clinton would have condemned in Republicans."

One of the reasons our presidential campaigns have gotten to be so long is to give candidates a chance to hone their messages, make their gaffes and recover from them.

And Clinton has plenty of time to recover from this blunder.

"To my ear, Mrs. Clinton got it right when she said in the first debate that the federal government historically steps in to 'save capitalism from itself,'" Daniel A. Seligman said in a letter to the editor responding to the Times' editorial. "It is time for her to deliver the big speech in which she tells us exactly how she will do that."

And no doubt she will. But the question that remains after Clinton's serial missteps on the question of Wall Street is whether she simply doesn't get it.

In his letter, Seligman echoed Sanders' denunciation of Wall Street's business model as "greed and fraud," showing why the Vermont senator's critique is resonating so strongly with voters: "The fact is that leading banks knowingly defrauded investors, ruined the lives of millions of borrowers who weren't truly creditworthy, and ultimately failed to responsibly finance steady expansion of the real economy."

If Hillary Clinton cannot get on board with that assessment, she faces an uphill battle in improving her poll ratings for trustworthiness and achieving her goal of returning to the White House.

Columnist Darrell Delamaide — @ddelamaide on Twitter — has reported on business and economics from New York, Paris, Berlin and Washington for Dow Jones news service, Barron's, Institutional Investor and Bloomberg News service, among others.