THE meteoric rise of the Clintons to the ranks of America’s wealthiest families has presented a challenge to Hillary Clinton’s presidential ambitions at a critical stage in the battle for the Democratic nomination.

The Clintons left the White House burdened by debt but have earned $109m (£55m) in the past eight years, putting them among the 14,500 richest families in the country and presenting a stark contrast to the impoverished families championed by her campaign.

Nearly half their income came from speeches given by Bill Clinton, often to companies that are big donors to his wife, raising ethical questions about the influence they were buying.

The former president reeled in at least $12.6m - and a possible further $2.7m last year - from a business partnership with his friend Ron Burkle, the supermarket magnate and financier. Bill Clinton has his own room in Burkle’s mansion in Los Angeles and travels so frequently on Burkle’s private jet that he jokingly calls it Air Force Two.

A race like a crackpot Dynasty

The contest between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton matches any fiction

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The Clinton campaign claimed that more than $10m of the earnings had been donated to charity, but the huge sum still raises more questions than it answers.

The bulk of the cash went to the Clinton Family Foundation and served as a tax write-off. The foundation has distributed only half its money - and most of that was after Hillary Clinton began running for president last year.

In 2006 the couple acquired an interest through a blind trust in a private investment fund based in the Cayman Islands, which is connected to Haim Saban. He is a billionaire Hollywood mogul and a big fundraiser for Hillary Clinton.

“This is a couple who have accumulated a vast amount of wealth in a very short period,” said Sally Bedell Smith, author of For Love of Politics, a biography of the Clinton White House years. “It will be interesting to see whether it will have an impact on the regular Joe worker.”

Hillary Clinton tried to delay releasing the tax returns until after the primary season but was taunted by Barack Obama, her rival for the Democratic nomination, into making them public after he released his own, showing that he and his wife Michelle earned about $1m in 2006.

The Obama campaign will now step up the pressure on Clinton to release the names of donors to her husband’s presidential library, who include a number of Middle Eastern potentates. More than 10% of its $165m cost came from foreign sources, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

Carl Bernstein, the Watergate journalist and author of A Woman in Charge, a biography of Hillary Clinton, said the tax returns provided an incomplete picture of the Clintons’ financial relationships.

“This is not transparency. That’s the difficulty with the Clintons all the time. There’s always less than transparency when these things occur under duress,” Bernstein said.

Clinton told a convention of Democrats in North Dakota when her tax forms were made public: “Don’t get me wrong, I have absolutely nothing against rich people. As a matter of fact my husband, much to my surprise and his, has made a lot of money since he left the White House by doing what he loves most - talking to people.”

Bill Clinton’s speaking fees and money from his 2004 autobiography, My Life, as well as the partnership earnings from Burkle’s Yucaipa Global Opportunities Fund, accounted for the largest portion of the Clintons’ joint income. Bill Clinton appears to have played the role of goodwill “door opener” for the billionaire financier, who has business ties with the government of Dubai and a media company in China.

“This is going to put Bill Clinton back in the forefront of the story in a big way,” said Bedell Smith. “He has already had a profoundly negative effect on the campaign with his volcanic eruptions and erratic behaviour.”

She believes that the couple’s wealth will remind voters of the ethical problems of the Clinton White House years. “They got into trouble because of suspect business dealings which were perhaps not illegal, but raised ethical questions about conflicts of interest,” she said.

Clinton’s presidential prospects are already threatened by a steep decline in support in Pennsylvania, once thought to be a bedrock of her campaign. Hope is rising in the Obama camp that he could defy expectations and pull off a surprise win when the state votes on April 22.

Defeat in the Pennsylvania primary would administer a seismic shock to Clinton’s campaign and send superdelegates – the party leaders who hold the casting vote at the Democratic national convention this summer - racing to crown Obama as the victor.

“If she loses, the race is over,” said Tad Devine, a senior Democratic strategist.

Congressman Patrick Murphy, an Iraq war veteran and chairman of Obama’s campaign in Pennsylvania, said a narrow loss to Clinton would count as a victory: “If he keeps her lead down to single digits, it’s a win, given that the Clinton people have proudly told people they will win by 20 points.”

Clinton has been battered by revelations that she fabricated an account of landing under fire in Bosnia when she was first lady. She is also under pressure to sack Mark Penn, her strategist and polling guru, for meeting the Colombian ambassador to discuss a free trade agreement that Clinton opposes. Colleagues were infuriated by Penn’s admitted “error of judgment”.

Obama, 46, is outspending Clinton more than three to one on television and radio advertisements in the state after raising $40m last month, twice as much as his opponent.

One Pennsylvania poll last week showed Obama taking the lead for the first time by two points; another showed Clinton ahead by 11 points, but all the polls have recorded a sharp decline in her standing.

Ed Jasiewicz, 48, an airline pilot and retired marine from a town outside Philadelphia, said he was switching his vote to Obama. He had initially supported Clinton: “I knew the name, I knew the family and I knew the successes they had had.”

He changed his mind after attending an Obama rally: “I have four neighbours who have switched from Republican to Democrat to vote in this primary.” New voter registration figures show a record 234,000 new Democrats in the state, more than half of whom have changed their party affiliation.

Charlotte Bigley, a volunteer for Obama in a rural conservative community north of Pittsburgh, said: “I’m starting to think there’s going to be a surprise.” Four former Clinton supporters told her last week that they were defecting to Obama.

“This is an old-time racist area in a lot of ways, but people are coming out of that,” she said.

Devine said that Clinton remained the favourite to win in Pennsylvania because of its elderly white working-class population but the dynamics of the race were changing.

“Voters in Pennsylvania can feel very empowered by voting for Obama. They have a sense that they can end this race,” Devine said.

Clinton was forced to lend her campaign $5m in February to keep pace with Obama’s fundraising juggernaut. She was revealed last week to be behind on health insurance payments for her campaign employees, as well as debts to small vendors scattered across the states where she has campaigned.

Bedell Smith said the combination of the tall tale about Bosnia and the scale of Clinton’s wealth would have a “compounding effect because they summon to the surface the whole cascade of memories and lies back in the Clinton years”.

The Clinton wealth

Tax returns from 2000 including information on 2007

Income: $109,175,175

Bill Clinton
Speech income: $51,855,599
Book income: $ $29,580,525
Partnership with Ron Burkle: over $12.6m

Hillary Clinton
Book income: $10,457,083

Charitable contributions: $10,256,741

Taxes paid: $33,783,507

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