WASHINGTON — (CNN) Hillary Clinton may not be the Democratic nominee just yet, but during a trip through South Carolina this weekend Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker treated her like she had already won the primary as he hammered the former secretary of state as opposed to his GOP rivals.
“I’m not going to trash talk the other opponents like some have. Instead I’m going to focus on what we have to offer, why we’re the best candidate to take on the real opponent which is Hillary Clinton,” Walker told reporters in front of the Gaffney Peachoid, a looming Peach-shaped water tower made famous in Netflix’s “House of Cards” series.
“Hillary Clinton, after we’ve seen these emails, could be the deceiver in chief, but we can’t trust her to be the commander in chief,” Walker declared, before adding, “Every where she’s touched it’s more messed up today than it was before she and the president took office. She is a real threat to this country going forward.”
Rand Paul (and other candidates in other variations) have said before in South Carolina that her handling of Benghazi “precludes her from ever being president,” but on Sunday, Walker used Clinton as a real and tangible threat to fire up the crowd at the beginning of his speech.
At an afternoon event at an American Legion hall in Rock Hill, Walker jumped ahead of himself in his stump speech by saying, “First I want to talk about another candidate running for president… And instead of talking about the guy that was in the middle of the stage the other day, we need to talk about the real threat in this race and that is the possibility that Hillary Clinton could be elected president of the United States.”
Clinton’s name was met by boos in the crowd as he laid out why he finds her threatening: her support for Planned Parenthood (the organization that he defunded in Wisconsin), her opposition to voter ID laws (something else he put in place in Wisconsin), and the mysteries surrounding her email server.
He praised, even if it was a backhanded compliment, the GOP candidates who took part in both debates on Thursday night.
“Any of the people on that stage where I was standing would be infinitely better than Hillary Clinton as the next president of the United States.”
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