Stuck in Scandal Land
As long as she is in public life, Hillary will protect and serve herself.
Doesn’t the latest Hillary Clinton scandal make you want to throw up your hands and say:Do we really have to
do this again? Do we have to go back there? People assume she is our next president. We
are defining political deviancy down.
The scandal this week is that we have
belatedly found out, more than two years after she left the office of secretary
of state, that throughout Mrs. Clinton’s four-year tenure she did not conduct
official business through the State Department email system. She had her own
private email addresses and her own private Internet domain, on her own private
server at one of her own private homes, in Chappaqua, N.Y. Which means she had,
and has, complete control of the emails. If a journalist filed a Freedom of
Information Act request asking to see emails of the secretary of state, the
State Department had nothing to show. If Congress asked to see them, State
could say there was nothing to see. (Two months ago, on the request of State,
Mrs. Clinton turned over a reported 55,000 pages of her emails. She and her
private aides apparently got to pick which ones.)
Is it too much to imagine that Mrs. Clinton
wanted to conceal the record of her communications as America’s top diplomat
because she might have been doing a great deal of interesting work in those
emails, not only with respect to immediate and unfolding international events
but with respect to those who would like to make a positive impression on the
American secretary of state by making contributions to the Clinton Foundation,
which not only funds many noble causes but is the seat of operations of Clinton
Inc. and its numerous offices, operatives, hangers-on and campaign-in-waiting?
What a low and
embarrassing question. It is prompted by last week’s scandal—that the Clinton Foundation accepted
foreign contributions during Mrs. Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state. It is
uncomfortable to ask such questions, but that’s the thing with the Clintons,
they always make you go there.
The mainstream press is all over the story now
that it has blown. It’s odd that it took so long. Everyone at State, the White
House, and the rest of the government who received an email from the secretary
of state would have seen where it was coming from—a nongovernmental address.
You’d think someone would have noticed.
With the exception of the moment Wednesday
when a hardy reporter from TMZ actually went to an airport and shouted a query
at Mrs. Clinton—it was just like the old days of journalism, with a stakeout
and shouted queries—Mrs. Clinton hasn’t been subjected to any questions from
the press. She’ll slide, she’ll glide, she’ll skate. (With TMZ she just walked
on, smiling.)
Best of the Web Today
Columnist James Taranto on the news that Hillary Clinton used a personal email
account to conduct State Department business. Photo credit: Getty Images.
Why would she ignore regulations to opt out of
the State email system? We probably see the answer in a video clip posted this
week on Buzzfeed. Mrs. Clinton, chatting with a supporter at a fundraiser for
her 2000 Senate campaign, said: “As much as I’ve been investigated and all of
that, you know, why would I . . . ever want to do email?”
But when you’re secretary of state you have
to. So she did it her way, with complete control. It will make it harder, if
not impossible, for investigators.
The press is painting all this as a story
about how Mrs. Clinton, in her love for secrecy and control, has given
ammunition to her enemies. But that’s not the story. The story is that this is
what she does, and always has. The rules apply to others, not her. She’s
special, entitled, exempt from the rules—the rules under which, as the
Federalist reports, the State Department in 2012 forced the resignation of a
U.S. ambassador, “in part for setting up an unsanctioned private e-mail
system.”
Why doesn’t the legacy press swarm her on
this? Because she is political royalty. They are used to seeing her as a regal,
queenly figure. They’ve been habituated to understand that Mrs. Clinton is not
to be harried, not to be subjected to gotcha questions or impertinent grilling.
She is a Democrat, a star, not some grubby Republican governor from nowhere.
And they don’t want to be muscled by her spokesmen. The wildly belligerent
Philippe Reines sends reporters insulting, demeaning emails if they get out of
line. He did it again this week. It is effective in two ways. One is that it
diverts attention from his boss, makes Mr. Reines the story, and in the process
makes her look comparatively sane. The other is that reporters don’t want a
hissing match with someone who implies he will damage them. They can’t afford
to be frozen out. She’s probably the next president: Their careers depend on
access.
But how will such smash-mouth tactics play the
next four, five years?
Back to the questions at the top of the
column.
Sixteen years ago,
when she was first running for the Senate, I wrote a book called “The Case
Against Hillary Clinton.” I waded through it all—cattle futures, Travelgate,
the lost Rose law firm records, women slimed as bimbos, foreign campaign cash,
the stealth and secrecy that marked the creation of the health-care plan,
Monica, the vast right-wing conspiracy. As I researched I remembered why, four
years into the Clinton administration, the New York Times columnist
William Safire called Hillary “a congenital liar . . . compelled to
mislead, and to ensnare her subordinates and friends in a web of deceit.”
Do we have to go through all that again?
In 1992 the Clintons were new and golden. Now,
so many years later, their reputation for rule breaking and corruption is so
deep, so assumed, that it really has become old news. And old news isn’t news.
An aspect of the story goes beyond criticism
of Mrs. Clinton and gets to criticism of us. A generation or two ago, a person
so encrusted in a reputation for scandal would not be considered a possible
presidential contender. She would be ineligible. Now she is inevitable.
What happened? Why is her party so in her
thrall?
She’s famous? The run itself makes you famous.
America didn’t know who Jack Kennedy was in 1959; in 1961 he was king of the
world. The same for Obama in ’08.
Money? Sure she’s the superblitz shock-and-awe
queen of fundraising, but pretty much any Democrat in a 50/50 country would be
able to raise what needs to be raised.
She’s a woman? There are other women in the
Democratic Party.
She’s inevitable? She was inevitable in 2008.
Then, suddenly, she was evitable.
Her talent is for survival. This on its own
terms is admirable and takes grit. But others have grit. As for leadership, she
has a sharp tactical sense but no vision, no overall strategic sense of where
we are and where we must go.
What is freezing the Democrats is her
mystique. But mystique can be broken. A nobody called Obama broke hers in 2008.
Do we really have to
return to Scandal Land? It’s what she brings wherever she goes. And it’s not
going to stop.
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No one is going to
pay $200,000 for a 15-minute canned speech or buy 100,000 copies of her book
and send two to every library in the country unless they think they're buying
access to the next POTUS. Hillary! will keep the myth alive as long as she can
to claim one last Big Payday, but it's telling that this supposedly tough and
experienced politician avoids the Media like the plague and can only appear in
carefully controlled venues.
Up close and
personal she has all the charm of a pit viper and it sounds like she has quite
a drinking problem as well.
