Hillary Just Failed Her First Test as a Candidate

Today on NRO

STEVEN MALANGA: New Jersey's governor has not won lasting reforms. The Christie Hiatus.

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: The prime minister's speech before Congress has forced Obama to defend his reckless Iran policy. Netanyahu's Churchillian Warning

JONAH GOLDBERG: Clinton's latest scandal should make liberals feel uneasy about continuing to support her. The E-mail Scandal Won't Doom Hillary.

RYAN LOVELACE: The Obama administration falsely took credit for stopping the border crisis. Mexican Drug Cartels Caused the Border Crisis.

PHOTO ESSAY: Movie Preview: Chappie.

Morning Jolt
. . . with Jim Geraghty, Conservative Journalist of the Year

March 06, 2015

Kids, I'd like to reintroduce you to the five-day school week. You haven't seen it since December.

Hillary Just Failed Her First Test as a Candidate

Picture it: Hillary Clinton beats Jeb Bush in the 2016 election. It's November 2017, nine months into her presidency and press reports suddenly reveal that none of the proposed reforms at the Department of Veterans' Affairs from 2014 had any real effect.

CNN and Fox News interview widows of veterans who died waiting for treatment. Whistleblowers come forward, declaring the reports of reduced wait times sent from the VA hospitals to Washington are faked again. They say they did everything they could to warn high-level officials in the Hillary Clinton administration but no one wanted to listen. Republicans on Capitol Hill collect example after example that the VA has failed in its duties again.

In the face of massive public outrage, President Hillary Clinton goes into the bunker. She only emerges for prearranged speeches to Emily's List, NARAL, and for a speech in Manhattan about the need for equal pay on Wall Street. She ignores all questions; the press is kept far from her in the back of the room. Bill Clinton is unreachable, on a trip to meet with Clinton Foundation donors in Dubai, the Mediterranean, and Southeast Asia, with no press traveling with him.

Four days into the story, the official presidential Twitter account offers one statement: "I and my entire administration have always cared about veterans. hrc" There is no word on what her VA secretary knew or when he knew it; he, too, goes into the bunker and avoids the press.

Meanwhile, White House press secretary David Brock goes out every day at the White House press room podium, and then afterwards to MSNBC, to attack the reporters of these stories, declaring them "hearsay and rumor" and denouncing the widows for suggesting the Clinton administration doesn't care about veterans.

Trust him!

It's not such an unimaginable scenario, right?

At the peak of the Lewinsky scandal, Bill Clinton told Dick Morris, "We'll just have to win then." Here's Charles Krauthammer, back in 1998:

Morris returns with polls showing that if it is just adultery, the public will forgive him. But if it is perjury or obstruction of justice, he's dead. Clinton's response: "Well, we just have to win then."

So out he goes, and win he does. He takes to TV and delivers one of the most skillfully faked bald-faced lies in American history, a lie delivered, in the words of his loyal friend of 30 years, Robert Reich, with "passionate intensity" and "stunning conviction" recalling "the great Method actors of a previous generation." Result? His polls soar. Disaster is averted. He wins.

A former Clinton aide has expressed doubts about the Morris story. But Morris or not, the polls back in January were absolutely clear: if Clinton lied under oath, 63% of Americans thought he should resign.

So Clinton went with the polls. It was win-win. Either he would be able to stonewall forever or, if truth was finally forced out, the more time that passed, the more opinion might change. And change it did. Seven months and dozens of corroborating leaks later, Americans had grown accustomed to the idea of not just a dallying President but of a lying, perjuring one.

We're seeing the same pattern again. A Clinton hand has been caught in the cookie jar. She broke rules and laws. The behavior is shady, slimy, secretive, self-interested. The hypocrisy is epic, as then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton directed employees not to use personal e-mail accounts for official business due to security concerns. There's no innocuous explanation.

So what are we seeing in response? Circle the wagons. Bully the press. Call in every favor. Cry "havoc" and let slip the dogs of partisan media narrative war. Counterattack. Draw moral equivalence. Flood the zone, fire off chaff, throw everything up against the wall and see what sticks.

Delay, and delay, and delay. And then, when she finally emerges from her hermetically-sealed sarcophagus that protects her from questions about these e-mails, or foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation, or Bibi Netanyahu's speech, or Obama's deal with Iran . . . insist that it's all old news.

No, really, that's exactly what the plan is, and her team is bragging about it:

Clinton and her team are aware that her tactics will only hold out for so long and that she'll eventually have to answer questions about her e-mail practices, but she and her advisers are aiming to delay that moment, ideally until she formally announces she's running for president. At that point, they hope, the controversy will have subsided to the point where her campaign launch will be a much bigger headline than her response to a month-old scandal. An added benefit to the approach: the potential for Republicans to overreach and overreact while Clinton stays silent.

Don't Louse This Up, Republicans!

Rick Wilson, consistently one of the most entertaining and sharp GOP strategists out there, writes over at Ricochet:

Only the GOP and conservatives can save her.

The press is possessed of a boundless desire to Change the Subject right now, and some intemperate remark would fit the bill perfectly. Don't give them a shiny object. Don't give them an excuse turn this into "Krazee Republicans Sure Hate Hillary Because She's A Woman." For God's sake, take a deep breath and skip talking about your favorite social issue.

In the next two weeks, try something new; maintain discipline, hold focus, and keep an eye to a bigger objective than your daily press release. Try to play the long game, and help Hillary Clinton self-destruct.

Proceed against Clinton with a measured pace and tone. Don't make it all about Benghazi or the records-keeping laws. Focus instead on the grave national security risks that her amateur-hour email server shenanigan posed. Do it with the sickly-sweet, sincere tone of "I just want to work in a bipartisan way for good, transparent government . . . and to protect national security secrets from the Chinese, Russians, and other threats" that the Acela media claims to worship.

Press the sore spots, subtly, but constantly. Use it as way to leverage discussion of the Clinton family's infamous contempt for the law and remind the public of their their obsessive secrecy, paranoia, habitual lawbreaking. Wonder, in serious tones, how much of the email traffic has to do with the other scandal that reporters have been desperately trying to cover up; the Clinton Foundation's scuzzy foreign-money vacuum. Welcome the chance for Mrs. Clinton to give her side of the story in press conferences, and hearings.

Yes, This Administration Lies About Life-and-Death Matters

I know there's a lot of gloom out there -- the addenda offers my best antidote -- but note that reality gets the last laugh. An administration can insist something is getting better all it wants, but sooner or later, reality presents itself in a way no one can ignore.

Stephen Hayes and Thomas Joscelyn, writing in the Wall Street Journal this morning:

In spring 2012, a year after the raid that killed bin Laden and six months before the 2012 presidential election, the Obama administration launched a concerted campaign to persuade the American people that the long war with al Qaeda was ending. In a speech commemorating the anniversary of the raid, John Brennan, Mr. Obama's top counterterrorism adviser and later his CIA director, predicted the imminent demise of al Qaeda. The next day, on May 1, 2012, Mr. Obama made a bold claim: "The goal that I set—to defeat al Qaeda and deny it a chance to rebuild—is now within our reach."

The White House provided 17 handpicked documents to the Combatting Terror Center at the West Point military academy, where a team of analysts reached the conclusion the Obama administration wanted. Bin Laden, they found, had been isolated and relatively powerless, a sad and lonely man sitting atop a crumbling terror network.

It was a reassuring portrayal. It was also wrong. And those responsible for winning the war—as opposed to an election—couldn't afford to engage in such dangerous self-delusion . . .

At precisely the time Mr. Obama was campaigning on the imminent death of al Qaeda, those with access to the bin Laden documents were seeing, in bin Laden's own words, that the opposite was true. Says Lt. Gen. Flynn: "By that time, they probably had grown by about—I'd say close to doubling by that time. And we knew that."

This wasn't what the Obama White House wanted to hear. So the administration cut off DIA access to the documents and instructed DIA officials to stop producing analyses based on them.

We've had a lot of talk about oblivious low-information voters around here lately. They'll buy the narrative that everything is fine… until something blows up one day.

ADDENDA: This week's pop-culture podcast is a particularly special one -- my cohost Mickey and I walk through the events of CPAC and reveal what I was really thinking when I was told the conference organizers were looking for me; also we discuss the infamous Saturday Night Live sketch about ISIS and the rumored new Ben & Jerry's flavor.

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Hillary Just Failed Her First Test as a Candidate

Hillary Just Failed Her First Test as a Candidate

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