A hacked audio recording taken from a private Hillary Clinton fundraiser that occurred in February indicates that the Democratic nominee’s campaign promise of free college tuition may be mere lip-service.
“There’s this deep desire to believe that we can have free college, free healthcare, that what we’ve done hasn’t gone far enough, and that we just need to, you know, go as far as, you know, Scandinavia, whatever that means, and half the people don’t know what that means, but it’s something that they deeply feel,” Clinton told well-heeled attendees at fundraiser held in Virginia and hosted by Beatrice Welters, the former U.S. ambassador to Trinidad and Tobago. “So as a friend of mine said the other day, I am occupying from the center-left to the center-right, and I don’t have much company there.
“Because it is difficult when you’re running to be president, and you understand how hard the job is — I don’t want to overpromise. I don’t want to tell people things that I know we cannot do.”
The audio was discovered inside a batch of hacked emails obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. The section of audio regarding Clinton’s views on the millennial support garnered by then-rival Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders was first reported by The Intercept:
Clinton can also be heard talking about the idealism emanating from Sanders’s base of young voters.
“Some are new to politics completely — they’re children of the Great Recession — and they are living in their parents’ basement,” Clinton said at one point. “They feel they got their education and the jobs that are available to them are not at all what they envisioned for themselves, and they don’t see much of a future.”
Clinton later remarked on the lure of what Sanders was selling:
“If you’re feeling like you’re consigned to, you know, being a barista, then the idea that maybe, just maybe, you could be part of a political revolution is pretty appealing,” said Clinton.
Audio and video of presidential candidates addressing donors under the assumption their comments won’t leave the room has affected campaigns in the past: consider footage leaked from a 2012 Mitt Romney fundraiser in which the then-Republican presidential nominee talked about the “47 percent” of voters “dependent on the government” who will vote for President Barack Obama “no matter what.”
Clinton spent the bulk of September aggressively courting the millennial vote via multiple appearances on various college campuses. A recent Quinnipiac University poll shows that Clinton lost support from voters aged 18 to 34 by 17 percent, although a poll released Thursday by Public Policy Polling shows that she has distanced herself from rival Donald Trump among voters under 30 in key swing-states including Colorado, Florida and Pennsylvania.
(AP Photo) 
