Hillary Clinton’s book launch is off to a shaky start after she sparked a Twitter firestorm on Monday suggesting that she and former President Bill Clinton were “dead broke” when they left the White House in 2000.
The statement, which scored “mostly false” on Politifact, sparked a #HillaryIsSoPoor hashtag that mocked the former secretary of state for pandering to the middle class.
But in perhaps a less-damning gaffe, Mrs. Clinton mistakenly suggested Wednesday that Abraham Lincoln was a senator during his earlier political career, an ABC affiliate in Chicago reported.
“I actually write about Rahm [Emanuel] in the book,” she said during an event with Mr. Emanuel to promote her book. “I asked him not to read it before we sat and did our interview. But it was in the very first chapter, the chapter I rightly call ’Team of Rivals,’ because that’s what it was in the beginning. A senator from Illinois ran against a senator from New York, just as had happened way back with a senator from Illinois named Lincoln and a senator from New York named Seward. And it turned out the same way.”
Abraham Lincoln was never a senator. He lost that election to Stephen A. Douglas after the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858. Mr. Lincoln won the 1860 Republican presidential nomination against William H. Seward, who became the president’s secretary of state from 1861–1865.
• Jessica Chasmar can be reached at jchasmar@washingtontimes.com.
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