Clinton: Those tax returns
Posted: Monday, April 07, 2008 9:14 AM by Mark Murray
The good thing for the Clinton campaign about the Penn story -- it's stepping on the tax return story. Sunday’s Washington Post noted that most of the charitable donations the Clintons made went to Clinton's foundation. "After earning more than $109 million over eight years, the Clintons took tax write-offs for $10.2 million in charitable contributions. In most of those years, that money was donated to the Clinton Family Foundation, and a portion was distributed to charitable causes. The family foundation is one of several philanthropic groups that bear the former president's name. But unlike the New York-based William Jefferson Clinton Foundation, which has directed more than $10 billion in corporate money and resources toward slowing the spread of AIDS, addressing climate change, and reducing hunger and poverty, the family foundation is a far smaller and more personal operation. This charity is based at the Clintons' Chappaqua, N.Y., home. Bill Clinton serves as its president, Hillary Clinton as secretary and treasurer, and daughter Chelsea as a director. None takes compensation."
“The returns, released as Hillary Clinton is battling for votes in the crucial April 22 primary in Pennsylvania, reveal a stark contrast between her personal finances and the working-class voters who are her core supporters,” the Boston Globe writes. “Her newly revealed wealth "certainly doesn't enhance her ability to be able to appeal to working-class Pennsylvanians," said Don Kettl, director of the Fels Institute of Government at the University of Pennsylvania. But her rival, Barack Obama, whose healthy income is nonetheless a fraction of Clinton's, still is struggling to chip away at Clinton's longstanding advantage among that voting bloc, Kettl said.”
On Saturday, the New York Times reported that a story Clinton has told on the campaign trail -- about “an uninsured pregnant woman who lost her baby and died herself after being denied care by an Ohio hospital because she could not come up with a $100 fee -- isn’t correct. “The woman, Trina Bachtel, did die last August, two weeks after her baby boy was stillborn at O’Bleness Memorial Hospital in Athens, Ohio. But hospital administrators said Friday that Ms. Bachtel was under the care of an obstetrics practice affiliated with the hospital, that she was never refused treatment and that she was, in fact, insured. ‘We implore the Clinton campaign to immediately desist from repeating this story,’ said Rick Castrop, chief executive officer of the O’Bleness Health System.”
“A Clinton spokesman, Mo Elleithee, said candidates would frequently retell stories relayed to them, vetting them when possible. ‘In this case, we did try but were not able to fully vet it,’ Mr. Elleithee said. ‘If the hospital claims it did not happen that way, we respect that.’”
Our friends at PolitiFact have created a Hillary Clinton White House travel map, showing the 82 countries she visited and what she did when there.
“President Bush campaigned back in 2000 as a compassionate conservative,” Clinton said yesterday in Montana, per NBC’s Abby Livingston. “People loved that. Nobody knew what that meant, but people loved it. It was something new, it sounded real good. Compassion's good, being conservative on lots of things is good. So, heck, let's take a chance.”
