JAMES TARANTO: IF MRS. CLINTON SEES HER SHADOW IT WILL BE 39 MONTHS OF CAMPAIGNING
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324769704579010883098257024.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLETopOpinion
Hillary Clinton’s next phase of life . . . has officially begun,” Politico reports. Well, stop the damn presses, she’s back. “She’s coming in to her husband’s signature foundation, which has been renamed for all three Clintons,” the third being 33-year-old Chelsea. “It’s the first time the two elder Clintons . . . are yoking their careers together.” Mercifully, there’s no word on whether they’re yoking anything else together.
How can we miss you if you won’t go away?
“The foundation provides her with a formal apparatus” and “is also the structure that has provided sustenance for the extended Clintonland for over a decade, a sprawling world of donors, supporters and close friends,” Politico explains.
Finally in paragraph 9 we get to the point, in a quote from Robert Gibbs, a former Obama White House press secretary: “I think having a place such as this for a platform gives her a great launching pad into 2016.” If Gibbs is right, Mrs. Clinton is using a sinecure at a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization–that’s the kind that’s supposed to be extremely limited in its political involvement–as a nascent campaign organization.
Now, the man currently in the White House, President Asterisk, made good on his “jocose” 2009 threat to subject his political opponents to Internal Revenue Service audits. Mrs. Clinton is a former rival of his, and there is reason to think there remains bad blood between Barack Obama and the Clintons. Could an IRS full-body search of the Clinton Foundation be in the offing?
Dream on. By all accounts the Obama IRS only goes after little guys.
Yesterday, ABC News reports, Mrs. Clinton “announced a series of speeches to address high profile public policy issues.” We think we liked her better when she began her 2000 Senate campaign with a “listening tour.” In the kickoff speech, to the American Bar Association, she discussed “what she called the ‘assault on voting rights’ “:
[Mrs.] Clinton denounced the Supreme Court’s invalidation of pre-clearance requirements in the Voting Rights Act, which require jurisdictions with a history of discrimination to clear voting law changes with the federal government.
“Some take the historic success of the Voting Rights Act as a sign that discrimination is a thing of the past,” [Mrs.] Clinton said. “By invalidating pre-clearance, the Supreme Court has shifted the burden back onto citizens facing discrimination and those lawyers willing to stand with them.”
And she condemned efforts to tighten voting requirements in several states including Florida, Texas and North Carolina, whose voting rights law she dubbed “the greatest hits of voter suppression.”
“Anyone who says racial discrimination is no longer a problem in American elections must not be paying attention,” [Mrs.] Clinton said.
It is Mrs. Clinton who isn’t paying attention–or who is being deliberately deceptive. The high court did not invalidate preclearance, the practice of requiring certain states and localities to obtain federal approval before making election-law changes. It invalidated the formula that was used to determine which jurisdictions were subjected to preclearance without any showing of discrimination–and it did so because the formula was based on data more than four decades out of date.
Plaintiffs, including the Justice Department, can obtain a court order subjecting a jurisdiction to preclearance, but only if they can prove discrimination. (“Your honor, you must not be paying attention” probably won’t suffice.) And Congress could reinstate automatic preclearance by enacting a new formula based on data from today rather than when Mrs. Clinton was in her mid-20s.
The Weekly Standard’s Michael Warren notes that Mrs. Clinton made an embarrassing slip of the tongue in the ABA speech, referring to the murdered civil-rights activist Medgar Evers as “Medgar Evans.” Oh well, the man she presumably aspires to succeed as president has made his share of gaffes, despite being widely recognized as the World’s Greatest Orator. Our favorite was when he referred to “Austrian,” apparently believing it was a language.
Comments are closed.
