JAMES TARANTO: POOR MRS. CLINTON
http://online.wsj.com/articles/best-of-the-web-today-poor-mrs-clinton-1402430484#
Hillary Clinton is making the rounds promoting her new book, or, as our colleague Bret Stephens describes it, her “artifact containing printed words.” In an interview that aired last night, ABC’s Diane Sawyer “wondered if Americans would understand why [Mrs.] Clinton needs a speaking fee of $200,000, ‘five times the median income in this country for one speech,’ ” as the Washington Free Beacon reports.
Mrs. Clinton’s reply: “I thought making speeches for money was a much better thing than getting connected with any one group or company as so many people who leave public life do.”
The former first lady pleaded poverty: “We came out of the White House not only dead broke but in debt. . . . We struggled to, you know, piece together the resources for mortgages for houses, for Chelsea’s education, you know, it was not easy. . . . We had to make double the money, because of, obviously, taxes, and then pay off the debts and get us houses and take care of family members.”
There is some truth to this: According to the Associated Press: “[Mrs.] Clinton’s Senate financial disclosure forms, filed for 2000, show assets between $781,000 and almost $1.8 million. . . . The same form, however, showed that the Clintons owed between $2.3 million and $10.6 million in legal bills.”
In response, Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus tells the AP: “Whether she was flat broke or not is not the issue. It’s tone deaf to average people.”
Yet there are some factual problems with Mrs. Clinton’s assertions. National Review’s Andrew Johnson notes a New York Times report from December 2000, more than a month before the end of Mr. Clinton’s term, that Mrs. Clinton had just inked a book contract with an $8 million advance.
That’s before agent fees and taxes, and even the gross amount is less than the upper estimate of the Clintons’ legal debt, so you can see why she might have felt it necessary to accept some speaking fees too. Only she couldn’t. By the time Mr. Clinton left office, Mrs. Clinton was already a U.S. senator, and Senate rules prohibit members from accepting honoraria (book fees are an exception). She didn’t start speaking for money until she left the secretary of state’s office. By that point the Clinton’s financial security was no longer in question.
Then again, who says the average American can’t relate to this sort of thing? Think of it this way: If somebody offered you $200,000 to give a speech, wouldn’t you take it? You may not be the average American, but we’ll bet she would too.
Politico reports that in another interview, this morning with ABC’s Robin Roberts, Mrs. Clinton offered some criticism of the president: “Beginning the process of working with then-Sen. Obama after I ended my [2008 presidential] campaign, we had . . . an awkward but necessary meeting to clear the air on a couple of issues, and one of them was the sexism that–unfortunately–was present in that ’08 campaign.”
An example:
[Mrs.] Clinton wrote that she rejected a request from the Obama campaign to attack Sarah Palin, who was then running for vice president.
“That very first day, the Obama campaign said, ‘Well, we want you to go out there and criticize her,’ and I said ‘For what? For being a woman? No, let’s wait until we know where she stands, I don’t know anything about her. Do you know anything about her?’ ”
The timing here is a bit of a head-scratcher. Sarah Palin became the Republican vice-presidential nominee in late August, almost three months after Mrs. Clinton conceded the Democratic presidential nomination to Obama. Does that mean the Obama campaign backslid into “sexism” after her warning–or did the air-clearing meeting take place later, perhaps after the election when Obama was considering nominating her for secretary of state?
Here’s another puzzler from the Sawyer interview:
Clinton said she views the criticism over her role in the deadly 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate Benghazi, Libya as “more of a reason to”–rather than not to–run for president in 2016.
“Actually, it’s more of a reason to run, because I do not believe our great country should be playing minor league ball. We ought to be in the majors,” Clinton said. “I view this as really apart from–even a diversion from–the hard work that the Congress should be doing about the problems facing our country and the world.”
She also said: “I take responsibility, but I was not making security decisions.” We’re not sure what any of this means, but hey, what difference does it make?
CNN’s Jake Tapper points to a factual inaccuracy in the book’s account of Benghazi:
Noting how many members of the public and Congress were surprised upon discovering “there were no U.S. Marines assigned to our Benghazi compound,” [Mrs] Clinton notes that Marines are assigned to only slightly more than 50% of the diplomatic posts throughout the globe, focused primarily on protecting, and if need be destroying classified items.
“So while there were Marines stationed at our embassy in Tripoli, where nearly all of our diplomats worked and which had the capability to process classified material, because there was no classified processing at the diplomatic compound in Benghazi, there were no Marines posted there,” [Mrs.] Clinton writes. . . .
But, as Gen. Carter Ham, the former commander of Africa Command, testified before Congress on June 26, 2013, “there was no Marine security detachment in Tripoli.”
It wasn’t until after the attack that Marines were sent to the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli.
The New Republic’s Noam Scheiber reports that the book is critical of Obama’s foreign policy toward Syria, Egypt, Russia and Cuba. But according to Scheiber, the White House is taking it all in stride, thanks to an “unspoken pact between Hillary’s world and Obama’s,” which Scheiber calls a “marriage of convenience”:
As annoying as it must be to have the most popular Democrat in the country distance herself from his foreign-policy B-sides, the broader arrangement still beats any plausible alternative. Consider: If not for the way Hillary’s proto-campaign has frozen the Democratic presidential field, there would already be half-a-dozen Democratic governors and senators trooping through Iowa, complaining to anyone who will listen that Obama still hasn’t closed Guantanamo, arrested any Wall Street bankers, or brought the NSA to heel.
That’s an interesting point. As for what’s in it for Mrs. Clinton, “no political persona has been more rewarding than her team-player persona. Her approval rating jumped 10 points when she agreed to become secretary of state in 2008,” Scheiber observes. He doesn’t mention the public sympathy she earned a decade earlier as a wronged wife fiercely defending her husband–also a “team player” of sorts.
But “team player” is an odd “persona” for a would-be leader to cultivate.
Comments are closed.
