By: KENNETH MAXWELL

Folha de São Paulo - Op-ed section - page A2     

When Brazilians get involved in the U.S. influence peddling business they almost always do so at the wrong time, in the wrong place and with the wrong people. Take the past week for example. With increasingly ugly Democratic Party primaries underway in Indiana and North Carolina, contests which according to the dominant narrative in the U.S. press pitted a tough old ally cat from New York (also known as Senator Hillary Clinton) against a wimpy Gazelle from Illinois (also know as Senator Barack Obama), former President Bill Clinton took a day off from the campaign trail to visit New York and rake in another $200,000 dollars for making a speech to Brazilians, according to various news sources.

The Clinton couple, we now know after they were reluctantly obliged to reveal their tax returns, made over $100 million dollars from such speeches and books deals since they left the White House.

Ironically, Bill Clinton has been discouraged from too much public speaking by his wife's campaign managers. In recent months the former president has been too often off key, and more dangerously for his wife's prospects, too often displaying his perennial bad temper in public. His outburst after the South Carolina primary in January thoroughly alienated black voters who saw his dismissive comments about Barack Obama's victory there as racist.

But then Hillary Clinton, who enjoyed a sheltered and prosperous youth in a Chicago suburb, went to the elite women's university near Boston and Yale Law School, has reinvented herself as a feisty "working class hero". She has done this in order to appeal to white working male voters in old industrial states like Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania where the white males face the reality of tens of thousands of high paying jobs lost to overseas completion, and their families face escalating fuel and food prices.

So while Hillary was attacking trade deals in Indiana, Bill took the day off go to New York to make a cool $200,000 telling the Brazilians he favored free trade. His speech and his fat fee were courtesy of that perennial Brazilian self-promoter, Mario Garnero. By Tuesday Mrs. Clinton had found something good to say about Brazilian ethanol. On Wednesday she loaned her campaign 6.4million.

KENNETH MAXWELL is a weekly op-ed columnist (every Thursday) for Folha de São Paulo, Brazil's leading newspaper