Stuck in Scandal Land
As long as she is in public life,
Hillary will protect and serve herself.
By Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal
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’s slide, she’ll glide, she’ll skate. (With TMZ
she just walked on, smiling.)
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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