{"id":8275,"date":"2015-03-10T08:08:41","date_gmt":"2015-03-10T15:08:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=8275"},"modified":"2015-03-10T08:08:41","modified_gmt":"2015-03-10T15:08:41","slug":"how-many-straws-on-hillarys-back","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/how-many-straws-on-hillarys-back\/","title":{"rendered":"How Many Straws on Hillary\u2019s Back?"},"content":{"rendered":"

She is the star of the Democratic party \u2014 and for Democrats that\u2019s a big problem.<\/em><\/h3>\n
by Victor Davis Hanson\u00a0\/\/ National Review Online<\/a><\/div>\n
\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

H<\/span>illary Clinton\u2019s pre-campaign for the 2016 presidential race is predicated on three givens: her landmark status as the likely first female presidential candidate of one of the two major parties; her name recognition as a Clinton; and the fact that no Democratic strategist is yet willing to risk turning over a presidential campaign to Joe Biden or Elizabeth Warren.<\/p>\n

Polls show that right now Hillary would both win the Democratic nomination and be elected president. But that likelihood assumes that four considerations will go her way.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The first is that she will not<\/em> have to run on her record as secretary of state. Instead, she is betting that her iconic status and her years in Washington as first lady and then as a senator will trump her four years as Barack Obama\u2019s chief foreign-policy architect.<\/p>\n

Her record as secretary was dismal \u2014 perhaps the worst since the tenure of Cyrus Vance under Jimmy Carter. The Obama\/Clinton reset diplomacy with Russia ended with Vladimir Putin gobbling up Crimea and eastern Ukraine, and starting a bitter new Cold War. Her idea of bombing Libya without congressional approval and in excess of the limited U.N. resolutions proved a disaster, especially when the U.S. let the ensuing mess on the ground fester.<\/p>\n

Pulling every American peacekeeper out of a quiet Iraq at the end of 2011 green-lighted radical Islamist terrorism and helped to birth the Islamic State.<\/p>\n

On her watch, Israeli-American relations became the worst since the founding of Israel.\u00a0Most Sunni states in the Middle East do not trust the United States any more; they are confused only whether we are na\u00efve about Iran or are trying in clumsy fashion to forge some new strategic partnership with the terrorist theocracy.<\/p>\n

Yet Clinton is probably right that the public is more interested in the idea of her as the first woman president than in her disastrous conduct of American foreign policy. And so she is probably correct that by 2016 most voters will have forgotten or won\u2019t care what a mediocre secretary she proved to be.<\/p>\n

Second, Clinton also supposes that the public has long forgotten the scandals that engulfed her during the last years of her husband\u2019s presidency.<\/p>\n

Does anyone still remember Travelgate, Whitewater, Filegate, shady cattle futures, defiance of subpoenas for billing records at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, the fact that she is the only first lady in history to be subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury, and the mysterious presidential pardon during her Senate campaign of convicted Puerto Rican terrorists in New York? The common denominator in all these fiascos was her assumption that she was above the law \u2014 that, and petty avarice. Or rather, Hillary always believed that progressive warriors such as herself needed the resources to do noble work and therefore should be exempt from legal scrutiny.<\/p>\n

No matter. Clinton is probably right that the public either has forgotten all those ethical lapses or wants to move beyond them. Or maybe she assumes that unless she is indicted, the desperate Democratic party has no choice in 2016 except to nominate her \u2014 and if nominated she can win.<\/p>\n

Third, Clinton also calculates that voters will not care much that she has always been a gaffe-prone and wearying public figure. She has clumsily feigned an African-American patois in front of black audiences. In her failed 2008 presidential bid, for a while she tried to construct a white-working-class persona. When angered, her voice becomes eerily shrill. In impromptu interviews she can and will say almost anything.<\/p>\n

When questioned about the circumstances surrounding the four Americans\u2019 being killed in Benghazi, Clinton blurted out, \u201cWhat difference \u2014 at this point, what difference does it make?\u201d She once whined that when the Clintons left office they were broke and could barely pay the mortgages<\/em> on their million-dollar-plus properties<\/em>. Note the plurals.<\/p>\n

But once again, Clinton is probably right to assume that because she has no Democratic rival like Barack Obama this time around, voters will conclude she is far more viable than any of the alternatives. Given that the nomination is hers for the losing, Clinton\u2019s strategy for now is possum-like: Ignore the scandals, the memory of which will eventually die out, and limit the occasions where she might be asked questions that would require an ad hoc response \u2014 while offering canned one-liners about her historic candidacy and other gender boilerplate.<\/p>\n

Finally, will the public forgive recent Clinton scandals and lapses? Here the picture may not seem so bright.<\/p>\n

As secretary of state, Clinton used personal e-mail accounts on her own private, unsecured server in a way that was designed to avoid transparency. But for a government official, communicating without an electronic trail is both unethical and illegal. Promising when caught to turn over government correspondence is not quite the same as making such communications available from the get-go. Note that Clinton\u2019s private, non-government server domain was not for secondary accounts; it was her sole e-mail account during her tenure in the Obama administration. The only logical implication is that Clinton was trying to shield her communications from later public scrutiny \u2014 and from possible scandal or subpoenas. And it largely has worked. What is missing from discussion of this scandal is that the secretary of state for four years freelanced with private e-mail addresses \u2014 and that everyone in the administration who received her e-mails knew it, and no one cared.<\/p>\n

As secretary, she also received millions of dollars in gifts for her family\u2019s quarter-billion-dollar-endowed Clinton Foundation from foreign heads of states and wealthy foreign nationals. Obviously, it is improper, to say the least, for the chief foreign-policy officer of the United States to solicit for her family foundation when dealing with foreign governments. Clinton\u2019s aides must have assumed that none of those tawdry shakedown communications were recorded electronically on her private e-mails \u2014 as if checks arrived in the U.S. spontaneously without prior discussion. In fact, Hillary Clinton was the chief fundraiser for her family foundation and had the ideal platform from which to garner big checks. When Bill Clinton points to the Clinton Foundation\u2019s noble work or asserts that it does not prejudge the nature of its nation-state donors, his moral obtuseness about what a secretary of state should and should not do only makes Hillary\u2019s plight worse.<\/p>\n

Ms. Clinton of course emphasizes her gender and, by association, feminist issues. One might ask whether she ever worried about the gender apartheid practiced by the very Middle East monarchies from which she solicited gifts. In addition, her husband\u2019s past philandering is no longer just ancient history. It was recently reported that Bill Clinton flew more than a dozen times on the private jet (dubbed \u201cthe Lolita Express\u201d) of convicted sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein, who had a sick habit of procuring underage girls for his Caribbean-island getaways. The fact that Hillary Clinton herself, while a U.S. senator, paid female staffers substantially less than their male counterparts for the same work hardly gives her sufficient feminist credentials to negate the embarrassing fact that her husband cavorted with a convicted sexual predator and a group of underage girls. Does such hypocrisy matter? It has not mattered much in the past, given the liberal tenet of exemption: A progressive man with a large libido can mouth liberal platitudes while treating women as he pleases, on the assurance from other women that a few unfortunate Monicas or Paulas are a small price to play for advancing abortion rights or affirmative action. If on public occasions Joe Biden in creepy fashion hovers over young girls and other men\u2019s wives, or if Al Gore is accused of sexually harassing a masseuse, who really cares? Can\u2019t we put up with Bill Clinton on a plane where there are frolicking teenagers if the alternative to his liberalism is a staid Ted Cruz stopping late-term abortions?<\/p>\n

Finally, Hillary Clinton has regularly charged cash-strapped universities between $200,000 and $300,000 for a canned 20- to\u00a030-minute speech. UCLA dared to negotiate with Hillary\u2019s agents and was told that her $300,000 demand was the special cut rate for universities<\/em>. When students owe over $1 trillion in collective debt \u2014 largely because of skyrocketing university tuition and expenses \u2014 Clinton\u2019s fees take on the appearance of price gouging. But here too, leftwing students don\u2019t seem to mind paying for greed if the greed comes with liberal orthodoxy.<\/p>\n

Note two facts about the Clinton scandals. One, hypocrisy is at the core of them all: lecturing about feminism, but silent about unequal pay when she was the paymaster. Or decrying the old-boy system, while ignoring her own husband\u2019s callous treatment of women, some of them subordinate employees. Hillary sent a memo reminding State Department employees not to break the law concerning non-government e-mail correspondence that she herself so readily broke. She talks eloquently of inequality and fairness but then charges universities the sort of fees that ultimately only add to the exorbitant price of a college education.<\/p>\n

Two, there is never an end to Clinton scandals, precisely because both Bill and Hillary assume that the media will not fully investigate what they do, and that their progressive agendas justify any means necessary to achieve them. And because their habitual expectation of government and media privilege is now four decades long, and because they have not entered ethical rehab, there will be lots more embarrassment to emerge. The latest are reports that Hillary Clinton\u2019s youngest brother, Tony Rodham, was part of a U.S. consortium that sought a rare sweetheart mining concession from the beleaguered Haitian government, which was still reeling from the disastrous earthquake \u2014 at precisely the time it was negotiating with the U.S. government for massive American relief aid. Add it all up: Natural disaster, poor people of color, thousands of wrecked lives, an impoverished nation \u2014 and the secretary of state\u2019s brother and a foreign mining corporation were conniving to obtain a concession to mine gold at a reduced rate from a corrupt government.<\/p>\n

Hillary Clinton may prove to be the proverbial camel whose cumulative straws of scandals and unethical behavior will finally break her back. She is the most ethically compromised candidate in recent memory, and genuinely sees no reason why federal laws or ethical prohibitions should ever apply to her exalted self. The idea that she still may be nominated has long excited, but increasingly also terrifies, Democrats.<\/p>\n

Hillary\u2019s nomination will require the greatest amount of lying and suspension of disbelief in modern political history. If the Republicans have lots of candidates but none that are especially well known, the Democrats have invested in just one, the star and star-crossed Hillary Clinton, who they hope will win the presidency but fear will, in trying to reach the White House, destroy the Democratic party.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

She is the star of the Democratic party \u2014 and for Democrats that\u2019s a big problem. by Victor Davis Hanson\u00a0\/\/ National Review Online Hillary Clinton\u2019s pre-campaign for the 2016 presidential race is predicated on three givens: her landmark status as the likely first female presidential candidate of one of the two major parties; her name […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[247,92,145,11,23,187,185],"tags":[992],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-29t","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":9312,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/hillarys-sputtering-campaign\/","url_meta":{"origin":8275,"position":0},"title":"Hillary\u2019s Sputtering Campaign","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 25, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"Facing a free-wheeling Trump, she is weighted down by tons of baggage. By Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Online This year was supposed to be Hillary Clinton\u2019s \u201cturn,\u201d after her humiliating loss in 2008 to Barack Obama. She has paid her dues as secretary of state for Obama. And\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Trump"","block_context":{"text":"Trump","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/trump\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9423,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wheres-the-letter-from-democratic-security-officials-opposing-hillary\/","url_meta":{"origin":8275,"position":1},"title":"Where’s The Letter From Democratic Security Officials Opposing Hillary?","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 22, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"By Victor Davis Hanson\/\/Town Hall A group of 50 conservative foreign policy elites and veteran national security officials of prior Republican administrations recently wrote an open letter denouncing Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. They cited especially his lack of character and moral authority -- and his \"little understanding of America's\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Campaign 2016"","block_context":{"text":"Campaign 2016","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/campaign-2016\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":823,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/target-ann-romney\/","url_meta":{"origin":8275,"position":2},"title":"Target: Ann Romney","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 19, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Recently a Democratic operative, Hilary Rosen, was furious that Mitt Romney had made reference to his wife\u2019s opinions on women\u2019s issues and the economy. So Rosen blurted out on a cable news show that Ann Romney \u201chasn\u2019t worked a day in her life.\u201d\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Women"","block_context":{"text":"Women","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/women\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3393,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-clinton-albatross\/","url_meta":{"origin":8275,"position":3},"title":"The Clinton Albatross","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 27, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services If polls are accurate, Sen. Hillary Clinton's once-sure bid for the Democratic presidential nomination is now not so sure. Her wide lead vanished without warning in Iowa and New Hampshire \u2014 and maybe elsewhere as well. Was it due to her waffling on\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "December 2007"","block_context":{"text":"December 2007","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2007\/december-2007\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10227,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-obamas-and-the-clinton-road-to-perdition\/","url_meta":{"origin":8275,"position":4},"title":"The Obamas and the Clinton Road to Perdition","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 30, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"By Victor Davis Hanson American Greatness Hillary and Bill Clinton were a proud, progressive power couple who came into big-time state politics on promises of promoting \u201cfairness\u201d and \u201cequality.\u201d It did not matter much that very little in their previous personal lives had matched such elevated rhetoric with concrete action.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bill Clinton"","block_context":{"text":"Bill Clinton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/bill-clinton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4305,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-strange-metamorphosis-of-senator-clinton\/","url_meta":{"origin":8275,"position":5},"title":"The Strange Metamorphosis of Senator Clinton","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 8, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services \"I am, you know, adamantly against illegal immigrants.\" Who recently blurted that out? Pat Buchanan? Congressman Tom Tancredo? Nope, it was Hillary Clinton. Which Democratic senator has expressed little public remorse in voting for 23 counts to authorize war against Iraq, and has\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "August 2005"","block_context":{"text":"August 2005","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2005\/august-2005\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8275"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8275"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8275\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8278,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8275\/revisions\/8278"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}