By now, Hillary Clinton is as polished as politicians come. At 69, her hair is perfectly coiffed and colored, her makeup is subtle and her clothes are expensive. A trained debater, educated at Wellesley and Yale Law School, with decades of public life, she speaks well.
In an election that she has framed around temperamental fitness for the presidency, her deliberate comments and careful parsing of words suggest that she possesses the steadiness and judgment required. That is the image we saw when she stood on a debate stage with the far less controlled, more hot-tempered Donald Trump.
Clinton’s public persona is a façade, though a well designed one, held up by her staff, masters of television illusion and a collaborating national media. With the release of WikiLeaks emails, it has become clear that her senior staff questions that image among themselves.
To understand what she is likely to do with the enormous, now largely unchecked power of the American presidency requires seeing the reality behind that façade. Judging by her actions over the past 35 years in Washington and Arkansas, in roles from governor’s wife to First Lady, senator to secretary of state, it is clear that Hillary’s deep character flaws and temperamental shortcomings, while better hidden than Donald Trump’s very visible ones, present a much greater danger to our democracy.
Clinton’s character-revealing behavior includes incessant lying to the public; vast personal greed leading to corruption in high office; abuse of power on behalf of herself and against private citizens and political rivals; disregard for the law, and the very idea of the Rule of Law; disdain for the “deplorable” half of her opponent’s supporters, and the confession, made during a private Goldman Sachs speech revealed by WikiLeaks, that she typically offers one position on policy and politics in private and another, often very different one, for public consumption.
This admission alone makes it impossible to know whether any policy agenda she has campaigned on reflects her intentions. Or is she actually planning to implement unwelcome policies voters would reject if she were honest about them?
Nor is the media helping find the truth. As we have learned lately, some top-tier news organizations have offered her staff questions before interviews and debates, so that she can rehearse, and her staff can veto uncomfortable questions. Reporters have run copy past her campaign staff. The press seems happily complicit in this corruption, but it makes any reporting hard to trust.