Why Is Hillary Clinton So Devoid of Allies at the Moment?

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March 09, 2015

Why Is Hillary Clinton So Devoid of Allies at the Moment?

There's something weird about the way that the Washington, D.C. media conventional wisdom is changing so quickly about Hillary Clinton. Yes, it's worth remembering how certain corners of the non-conservative media turned on her with a vengeance in mid-2008 as the primary battle with Obama intensified:

. . . columnists decrying her "frigidity" and "inability to keep Bill on the porch"; the Washington Post's Robin Givhan writing about her cleavage; Randi Rhodes calling her "a f***ing whore"; Maureen Dowd claiming that she "has turned into Sybil"; MSNBC reporter David Schuster asking whether Chelsea was being "pimped out"; Katie Couric asking Hillary to confirm that her "nickname in school was Miss Frigidaire"; cartoonist Pat Oliphant depicting her crying while facing hostile foreign leaders (and Osama bin Laden expressing, "she's so sensitive, I had no idea!"); Chris Matthews declaring that "the reason she's a U.S. senator, the reason she's a candidate for president, the reason she may be a front-runner is her husband messed around"; comments from an unnamed Democratic party official that her effort once she fell behind in delegates was "the Tonya Harding option"; magician Penn Jillette declaring on MSNBC that Obama's success in February was due to Black History Month and Hillary's subsequent success could be attributed to "White Bitch Month"; an audience member at a debate asking her if she prefers diamonds or pearls; and John Aravosis of AmericaBlog posting pictures of Monica Lewinsky with her mouth wide open every time Hillary irked him.

But we can understand that vindictiveness and nastiness as merely a reflection that for the purposes of the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, Hillary was the de facto conservative villain, standing in the way of The Precious.

When we see this . . .

DAVID AXELROD, FORMER OBAMA WHITE HOUSE SENIOR ADVISER: Why did she use a -- a separate e-mail? How did she secure that e-mail? By not answering these questions, they allow -- they're allowing this story to fester in ways that are unhelpful.

We can chalk that up to 2008 bad blood. For all of his partisan inclinations, clearly there's some part of David Axelrod that wouldn't mind seeing Hillary and her 2016 campaign fall flat on their faces. The subtext of Axelrod's remark is that 'she and her team don't do their jobs as well as I did with the Obama team.'

The current White House staff appears equally eager to point out they wouldn't have tried such a stunt, and aren't willing to jump on any grenades over this:

"If they screwed up on the emails, if we find out they skipped over her emails . . . then that will be a problem for them, it'll be a scandal. But it's not one that we'll own," a senior administration official said.

But if you consider Mark Halperin's commentary as one of the most reliable weather vanes of Washington thinking, marvel at this:

MARK HALPERIN, BLOOMBERG NEWS: I said a few weeks ago on this show that I thought she was easily the most likely president of the United States. I now think not only is she because of this as a symptom and a cause, I now think she's not only not easily the most likely, I don't think she's any more the most likely . . . What she is doing here in terms of lack of response, lack of a sense of what people think of her and combined with what I thought was an extraordinarily weak performance at her Emily's List speech the other day, her husband can get through these things because he's a politician of a lifetime. She cannot. If this is the way she's going to run her operation, if this is the mindset she's going to have, I don't think she's going to be president.

When you add this . . .

"I would like her to come forward and just say what the situation is. She is the leading candidate, be it Republican or Democrat, to be the next President, and I think she needs to step up and come out and say exactly what the situation is," Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein said on NBC's "Meet the Press." "From this point on, the silence is going to hurt her."

You begin to wonder if Democrats are just plain getting tired of this. Hillary and David Brock and crew have asked their natural allies, Democrats and the mainstream media, to play their traditional role, rushing to the barricades for the Clintons and denouncing an alleged "vast right-wing conspiracy."

Here's Gail Sheehy in the New York Daily News contending that the liberal chattering class is appalled:

But the fallout to the email bombshell should once and for all put the lie to the "right-wing conspiracy" theory. The whole liberal cast of MSNBC, from Mika Brzezinksi on "Morning Joe" to Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O'Donnell, have sounded aghast all week that Hillary is again behaving as if she is above the rules that apply to ordinary humans.

Ron Fournier comes out and says what's lurking beneath the surface of this story: if powerful interests, groups, and countries wanted to buy influence with the Clintons, this is precisely how they would do it:

There was a reason why the Obama White House asked the foundation to stop taking foreign donations while she served as secretary of State. It looks unethical. It may be corrupt. And yet, shortly after she left the State Department to begin presidential planning, the foundation opened up the foreign-money spigot.

It never stopped taking money from favored corporations, and recently it entered into partnerships with "at least six banks that were under investigation, involved in litigation, or had been fined by government agencies and regulators," according to a CNN investigation.

What did these companies and countries expect in return for their cash? Did the Clintons promise any favors? Those are fair questions—not partisan questions and not media "gotcha" questions.

Note the New York Times today:

Reports of Mrs. Clinton's use of only a private email account while she was secretary of state, meanwhile, have cast a new light on efforts by outside groups to obtain access to her correspondence with the Clinton Foundation during her tenure at the State Department — about donations or anything else.

That's in an article about how Hillary Clinton, passionate crusader for women's rights around the globe, can justify "her family foundation's acceptance of millions of dollars in donations from Middle Eastern countries known for violence against women and for denying them many basic freedoms.

The Clintons' extraordinary sense of self-interest rarely aligns with progressives' interests, and they may have asked too much this time.

Bill and Chelsea Step In with Helpful Lies

Notice: We've now heard from Chelsea Clinton before we've heard from Hillary Clinton.

But on Saturday Chelsea Clinton defended her mother and her family's foundation, which she says has always "addressed and answered" all concerns over conflicts of interest.

"I believe that historically, all of those possible conflicts have been addressed and answered," the youngest member of the Clinton family said. "And we will have to continue to do that in the future to ensure that we are able to do the work that we are called to do and with the right partners along the way."

Unsurprisingly, that is completely false. "There are no indications any Clinton Foundation donations were ever sent to the State Department for approval."

Here's what Bill is saying:

"My theory about all of this is disclose everything and then let people make their judgments," Clinton told moderator Larry Wilmore of the cable channel Comedy Central. "I believe we have done a lot more good than harm and I believe this is a good thing."

Yeah, that sounds great, except they didn't disclose everything, like the seven foreign governments that gave to the Clinton Foundation while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State:

While the foundation has disclosed foreign-government donors for years, it has not previously detailed the donations that were accepted during Clinton's four-year stint at the State Department . . . The Washington Post reported last week that foreign sources, including governments, made up a third of those who have given the foundation more than $1 million over time.

When you hear Bill Clinton talk about the importance of disclosure, think back to this statement from him:

Now, there are a lot of other questions that are, I think, very legitimate. You have a right to ask them; you and the American people have a right to get answers. We are working very hard to comply and get all the requests for information up here, and we will give you as many answers as we can, as soon as we can, at the appropriate time, consistent with our obligation to also cooperate with the investigations.

And that's not a dodge, that's really why I've – I've talked with our people. I want to do that. I'd like for you to have more rather than less, sooner rather than later. So we'll work through it as quickly as we can and get all those questions out there to you.

That was January 22, 1998, after he had denied a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky, in response to a question of "exactly what your relationship was with Ms. Lewinsky, and whether the two of you talked by phone?" Of course, that information was never provided to the press until the Starr Report.

The Clinton family may not practice true transparency in their operations, but they almost make up for it in the transparently shameless strategy in these scandals.

Our old friend Mark Steyn:

At midnight last night, I posted a story that a friend of mine, a diplomat tipped me off, not an American diplomat, interestingly enough, but a non-U.S. diplomat, about how the American ambassador to Kenya was fired just three years ago during Hillary's term for precisely this, for using commercial email systems instead of secure government ones for official business. Hillary Clinton's State Department fired the U.S. ambassador for Kenya for doing that in 2012. The story's now been picked up by the Weekly Standard and Drudge and people, and I'm glad, I'm very glad of that, because I think it actually gets to the heart of the matter here, is that this country is decaying from a republic into a banana republic where if you're an inconsequential person, the rules apply to you. But if you're a select few, at the Hillary Clinton level, then the laws and the rules don't apply.

So Where Are the E-Mails?

Perfect. Representative Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., and chair of the special panel on Benghazi, Sunday:

"If you think to that iconic picture of her on a C-17 flying to Libya, sunglasses on — she has her hand-held device in her hand — we have no e-mails from that day," he said. "In fact we have no e-mails from that trip."

Maybe she was just playing "Candy Crush" that day.

ADDENDA: At CPAC, I ran into Matthew Tyrmand with OpenTheBooks.com. His father, the late Leopold Tyrmand, was a Polish-Jewish émigré anti-Communist writer. Northwestern University press just published a translation of Leopold Tyrmand's Diary 1954, a detailed, impassioned account of the daily indignities and oppression of life under Communist rule in Poland.

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