WHY HILLARY CLINTON IS IMPORTANT
1. Hillary Clinton is not a figure out of the past nor a has-been. She and Al Gore are currently the most popular candidates for president among Democrats. For all the money and effort that Lieberman, Kerry, Gephardt and the others have put into the race, they still lag HRC by 13 points or more and Gore by 33 points or more. What this means is that HRC remains a significant dark horse candidate regardless of what she says now. So who she is and what she does matters. Especially since Republicans are salivating at the thought of her running.
2. The Review's recent coverage of HRC has been slight compared to the archaic media. In fact, the article in question was 398 words long, only 97 more words than in the complaining letters. In contrast, the NY Times has written six articles totaling 5,700 words in the past week, the LA Times sent two reporters and two researchers to the Big Apple to cover the story, the Washington Post gave a detailed timeline of book sales, and NPR gave an extraordinary four minutes to a discussion of HRC's opus.
We thus have a long way to go before our coverage becomes obsessive. Further, our dossier on the Clintons has been more than matched by our archives on the Bushes, which has received more than a quarter of a million hits in the last three years.
3. The myth that the Clinton story is about sex makes about much sense as the Bush story about WMDs in Iraq. Even the impeachment story wasn't about sex but about presidential lying to prevent a fair court case for Paula Jones. The Clinton machine story was one of a never-ending list of scandals that included successful convictions of drug trafficking, racketeering, extortion, bribery, tax evasion, kickbacks, embezzlement, fraud, conspiracy, fraudulent loans, illegal gifts, illegal campaign contributions, money laundering, perjury, and obstruction of justice. The Clintons were basically mobbed-up politicians from one of the most corrupt states in the union and acted that way.
4. The sex angle is important primarily as a window onto the values and principles of participants. As I wrote in 1994 in 'Shadows of Hope:'
"There is sometimes a dizzying ad hoc quality to Clinton's policies. Perhaps this should be expected of a president who may be the first to have cited Machiavelli as a defense. Clinton often seems a political Don Juan whose serial affairs with economic and social programs share only the transitory passion he exhibits on their behalf." Besides if a politician lies that easily to his wife, why should I believe he'll tell me the truth?
5. It perhaps helps to know something rarely reported about the scandal that gave all the others their name. Whitewater was basically a resort land scam fifty miles from the nearest grocery store. A local TV reporter exposing it would have probably have won an Emmy. More than half of the purchasers, many of them retirees, would lose their plots thanks to the sleazy form of financing used. Two months after commencing the Whitewater deal, Hillary Clinton invested $1,000 in cattle futures. Before bailing out she earned nearly $100,000 on her investment. Many years later, several economists would calculate that the chances of earning such returns legally were one in 250 million.
5. The real Clinton story has always been available to any journalist curious enough to look into it. Several months before the 1992 convention, the Review published a list - the first in the country - of more than two dozen individuals and institutions whose connections with Clinton raised question about his candidacy. Some of this information, incidentally, came to us from liberal student activists at the University or Arkansas. Each of these connections would later figure in what became known as the Clinton scandals. It is wiser to learn and act on such information before rather than after a nominating convention.
6. The massive coverage of Hillary Clinton's book has generally ignored HRC's repeated lack of forthrightness on a variety of matters. For example, in a statement answering questions from a House investigating committee, Hillary Clinton said "I don't recall" or its equivalent 50 times. Her statement was only 42 paragraphs long.
4. In fiercely defending Clinton, liberals dissed integrity, their own political heritage, women, and set themselves up for losing the 2000 election. Missing from all the discussion of that election are some important results from the exit polling:
- 68% of voters thought Clinton would go down in history more for his scandals than for his leadership.
- 44% said that the scandals were somewhat to very important.
- 57% thought the country to be on the wrong moral track.
4. The Clinton years were disastrous for the Democratic Party, again something party members refuse to admit. At every level - from Senate to statehouse - the Democrats lost more seats during their incumbency than at any time since Grover Cleveland.
5. The Clinton administration was the warm-up band for the Bush administration. During that period, the country drastically lowered its expectations of public decency, integrity, civil liberties, and social democracy. The failure of liberals to stand up against Clinton's crypto-Republican policies foreshadowed the unwillingness of liberals to stand up against Bush in his anti-constitutional and manically belligerent acts. By the end of the Clinton years, liberal America had lost the capacity and the will to defend itself.
6. It is not the Review, but the Democratic Party that needs to put the Clintons behind them. As long as Hillary Clinton remains the best idea that Democrats have for a president, both the party and the country will remain in critical danger.
