The Democrats’ Vices

Today on NRO

KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON: The Democrats are on the wrong side of a familiar issue. Narrative of an American Slave.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: The absence of true leadership has created chaos at home and abroad. At the White House, There's Nobody Home.

SHANNEN W. COFFIN: The key e-mail questions remain unanswered by the State Department. Psaki's Wobbly Hillary Spin.

CHARLES C.W. COOKE: "The content of her character"? How quaint! When Democrats look at Loretta Lynch, all they see is her skin color. Does Dick Durbin Believe that Only White Males Can Bear Public Scrutiny?

PHOTO ESSAY: Photoshop of the Day.

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

March 19, 2015

The Democrats' Vices

There's a difference between having money and having power.

Congressional staffers who write the details of legislation have a lot of power, but they're usually making mid-five figures in high cost-of-living Washington, D.C., hoping to cash in someday with a more lucrative job on K Street. Sheldon Adelson can spend enormous sums in his political endeavors, but he doesn't have the power to guarantee his preferred guy wins.

Since 1992, the Clintons have had exceptional, almost unparalleled political power. From the point of view of most Americans, they've been wealthy. But not super-wealthy. In 1992, they listed their net worth at nearly $700,000. Yes, they had to spend quite a bit of money on lawyers during their time at the White House. But even before President Clinton gave his first post-presidential speech or signed his first book deal, he was going to get a pension of about $199,000 per year, plus a taxpayer-funded office, etc. She was elected to the Senate, with a salary of $141,300.

Hillary Clinton famously declared she and her husband were "dead broke" when they left the White House; of course, around that time they bought a $2.35 million home in Chappaqua. Between leaving the White House and beginning her Senate term she signed the $8 million book deal for Living History; years later, she got a $14 million advance for Hard Choices.

PolitiFact declared, "By Feb. 5, 2001, Bill Clinton was commanding regular speaking fees of $125,000 or more." By 2004, their net worth was at least $10 million. His speaking fees brought in tons of money, exceptionally quickly:

Bill Clinton has been paid $104.9 million for 542 speeches around the world between January 2001, when he left the White House, and January 2013, when Hillary stepped down as secretary of state, according to a Washington Post review of the family's federal financial disclosures.

Today Bill Clinton is the wealthiest ex-president. Hillary made more than $5 million in paid speeches after leaving the State Department.

Hillary Clinton is still giving paid speeches:

The American Camp Association of New York and New Jersey.

It's a not-for-profit organization that may be spending up to 10 percent of its $2 million budget to land Clinton for the Thursday speech in Atlantic City, if the former first lady is charging her usual fee of $200,000.

They have always been surrounded by a wide circle of generous donors. When you add up his campaigns, her campaigns, and their fundraising for the Clinton Foundation, the pair raised $2.1 billion from 1992 to 2013.

The Clintons travel entirely by charter or first class, with the expenses paid for by the Clinton Foundation.

(Hillary Clinton, speaking to an audience at the Clinton Global Initiative in September 2012: "There are rich people everywhere, and yet they do not contribute to the growth of their own countries.")

The Clintons' paid speeches are a bit like Peyton Manning taking a $200,000 check to appear at a corporate event (rumored at first to be a Sweet Sixteen party). Sure, it's a free country, but after a while, don't you have enough money?

The Clintons had enormous power, and considerable wealth. But mere considerable wealth wasn't enough; they wanted enormous wealth. Mogul wealth.

Maureen Dowd, two summers ago, lamented "The Clintons' neediness, their sense of what they are owed in material terms for their public service, their assumption that they're entitled to everyone's money."

There's a word for all this: greed.

Barack Obama is comfortable, and certainly enjoys taxpayer-funded travel and vacations, but he seems like a man driven primarily by power. He enjoys a net worth of about $12.2 million. And surely he intends to cash in with book deals and lucrative speaking contracts and the works.

But you get the feeling that Obama's a guy who's driven by the need for power. It's what defines his presidency: unilateral military action, the executive order on immigration, the unilateral decision to restore relations with Cuba, shutting Congress out of negotiations with Iran, the recess appointments, the secrecy, the budget brinksmanship and daring his opposition to shut down the government, the discussion of raising taxes through an executive order . . . Obama doesn't think he was put on Earth to live the high life. He was put here to "fundamentally transform the United States of America."

From the conservative perspective, both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are bad. Obama is more dangerous to the Constitutional order, checks and balances, and the rule of law.

Obama ran for president because he wanted the authority of a king; Hillary is running again because she wants to be treated like a queen.

It's in her slogan: "Ready for Hillary." You're ready for her. It's not about what she'll do for you or the country. This is a gift to her, a rectification of a great injustice inflicted upon her by ungrateful Democratic-primary voters in 2008.

The Clintons may be less power-hungry, but as the e-mail scandal demonstrates, they're every bit as allergic to transparency, accountability, and obedience to the rules, regulations, and laws.

Hugh Hewitt Interviews Ben Carson

You'll want to read all of Hugh Hewitt's interview of Ben Carson, but I suspect Hugh wanted to give the good doctor a sense of what kind of questions he can expect as the campaign heats up:

HH: So how high should the [defense] budget go? And they're playing some games in order to avoid the sequester cap by having an Overseas Contingency Operations fund combine with the Defense cap. But how high should total Defense spending go, putting aside the categories we've put it in? Do you have a number in your mind, Dr. Carson?

BC: Well, I would put I this way. We need to look around the world and see what our needs are. It's not necessarily the kind of thing that you can say $600 billion dollars is going to take care of this, or $700 billion, you know, that it may well. But you first of all have to ask yourself what your goals are, what are you trying to accomplish, and how critical those things are. And we look at, you know, things that are Level A critical, things that we absolutely must do. Those cannot be compromised. And we look at Level B, things we'd like to do, and Level C, things we may or may not do sometime in the future. Level A things, we must take care of, so I would be willing to sit down with the budgetary analysts to figure out what that amount has to be to accomplish those things.

Dear 2016 presidential candidates: Read The Looming Tower and study up on defense issues before that first debate.

ArmageddoMSNBC

The end of MSNBC as we know it is coming:

Year-to-date, MSNBC's daytime viewership is down 21 percent overall and 41 percent in the coveted 25-to-54 year-old demographic, putting it in fourth place behind Fox News, CNN and CNN's sister network HLN. Its primetime ratings are down 24 percent and 42 percent, respectively. In both daytime and primetime, MSNBC is bringing in its smallest share of the demo since 2005, the year before Keith Olbermann's scorched-earth admonitions of the Bush administration ushered in the current era of Rachel Maddow, Ed Schultz and Al Sharpton.

In the months ahead, MSNBC is likely to shake up the bulk of its programming, moving some shows and canceling others, high-level sources at NBCUniversal told POLITICO. With few exceptions — notably 'The Rachel Maddow Show' and 'Morning Joe' — every program is at risk of being moved or cancelled, those sources said. "All In with Chris Hayes," a ratings suck that currently occupies the 8 p.m. time slot, will almost certainly be replaced. Network execs are also considering moving some weekday shows, like "Politics Nation with Al Sharpton," to weekends.

"The plan is to reimagine what the channel is," one high-level NBCUniversal insider with knowledge of the network's plans said, "because the current lineup is a death wish."

ADDENDA: The Washington Post's headline: "Jeb Bush's tie to fugitive goes against business-savvy image he promotes."

That tie? A business deal from 1985.

At heart is Bush's outreach, as son of the vice president, to the secretary of health and human services, Margaret Heckler, about a business associate's request for a waiver from Medicare rules.

Deep in the story:

Heckler, now 84, said in a 2012 Huffington Post interview that Bush had called her.

Reached recently by The Washington Post, Heckler said she wanted time to consider the matter because her memory was fuzzy. She then did not respond to follow-up requests.

Now, there are more recent cases that raise some eyebrows, as readers of NR know . . . But one reader responded to that piece, "Who cares about any of this? Jeb's for open borders, amnesty, and federal control of your child's "education". Those things should hurt him more than some obscure business 'scandal.'"

What matters to conservatives doesn't matter to the mushy middle, and vice versa.

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The Democrats’ Vices

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