The Tipping Point The Clinton Foundation Keeps Taking Foreign Gratuities. By James Taranto
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-tipping-point-1429205939
Where’s Tipper Gore when you need her? “One of the great political mysteries of the early 2016 presidential campaign has been solved,” David Knowles of Bloomberg Politics reports, one hopes sarcastically: “Hillary Clinton did not leave a tip at the Chipotle restaurant she visited during her road trip to Iowa on Sunday.” Manager Charles Wright tells Knowles that ”the other lady,” presumably Huma Abedein, handed $21 to the counterman. The change, less than a buck, “was pocketed rather than deposited in the tip jar as many customers at the restaurant do, said Wright.”
That said, there was some rough justice in Mrs. Clinton’s being subjected to such an inane journalistic gotcha, which is typical of the coverage Republican candidates get. Knowles suggests his inquiry was prompted by Rush Limbaugh, who on his Tuesday program wondered “if she left anything in the tip jar, because that would be an indication that she understands the average, ordinary everyman that she seeks to represent.” It’s a successful application of Saul Alinsky’s Rule No. 4: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.”
The tipgate story might reflect a bit of damage control on Bloomberg’s part. Earlier this week Bloomberg Politics’ editor, Mark Halperin, was widely mocked—including by Limbaugh in that monologue—first for scoffing at the idea that the media were favorably predisposed to Mrs. Clinton, then for gushing: “We’ve never seen her get a burrito before.”
But it would be premature to say Halperin and his staff have lived down those comments. Consider how Bloomberg Politics covered a serious story involving gratuities—in this case from foreign governments to Mrs. Clinton’s family foundation.
“Clinton Foundation to Limit Donations From Foreign Countries,” read the Bloomberg headline last night. The same story had been reported 2½ hours earlier by The Wall Street Journal under a headline that suggested just the opposite: “Clinton Foundation to Keep Foreign Donors.”
Both headlines were accurate. As the Journal explains, the foundation’s new rules “would permit donations from Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and the U.K.—countries that support or have supported Clinton Foundation programs on health, poverty and climate change, according to the summary”—and, one might add, countries that are uncontroversial U.S. allies, unlike the authoritarian regimes whose donations have been particularly neuralgic.
But as the Journal notes, there’s a big loophole: “That means other nations would be prohibited from making large donations to the foundation. But those governments would be allowed to participate in the Clinton Global Initiative, a subsidiary of the foundation.”
And even the acceptance of money from inoffensive First World countries runs counter to the spirit of the campaign-finance laws Mrs. Clinton has been championing of late. Except for permanent resident aliens, all foreign nationals are prohibited from contributing to candidates for federal office. Even Canadians.
Trivial though it is, the tipping tale does suggest that Mrs. Clinton has gotten a bit rusty in the seven years since she last sought public office. Contrast it with this New York Times report from November 2007:
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign on Thursday introduced a Web site dedicated exclusively to the instantaneous rebuttal of charges or news reports it deems offensive or wrong.
And the day offered a perfect opportunity for the campaign, with a potentially embarrassing mini-scandal: a waitress’s report that Mrs. Clinton had failed to tip after eating at a Maid-Rite diner in central Iowa, an assertion that ricocheted around the Internet on Thursday.
After NPR broadcast the report, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign responded by saying the candidate and her aides had in fact left a tip: $100 on a $157 check at the diner. The restaurant manager, Brad Crawford, confirmed in interviews, including with The New York Times, that Mrs. Clinton, of New York, and her retinue had indeed left a tip, though he did not say how much.
NPR later included Mr. Crawford’s and the campaign’s versions of events in an editor’s note attached to the online version of its report.
But by then the story had been picked up and expanded upon on [sic] by, among others, the Drudge Report, which included a link to a report about a tip that Mrs. Clinton neglected to give in 2000. The Web sites of NBC News and ABC News also carried the story.
Mrs. Clinton’s rebuttal site, The Fact Hub, posted an item with the headline “Fact Check: Bill Paid, Tip Left At Iowa Maid-Rite.” It included details of the NPR editor’s note and Mr. Crawford’s statement.
Back then, someone on Mrs. Clinton’s team was sensitive enough to appearances to leave a showily huge (more than 60%) tip. The Daily Caller’s Jim Antle argues the 2016 campaign has been so inept thus far that he is moved to ask (somewhat tongue-in-cheek, at least as we read it) whether Mrs. Clinton is “really running for president”:
Hillary is touring Iowa in a van that resembles Scott Brown’s truck or even Scooby Doo’s Mystery Machine less than a vehicle used to transport very important people and tie up traffic via a motorcade.
What could have less of a common touch than inspecting the peasants through tinted windows while sitting in the backseat of a chauffeured car? Hillary could have at least called for an Uber on her one device.
Antle also cites a report in London’s Daily Mail suggesting a complete lack of spontaneity in Mrs. Clinton’s Iowa activities:
Hillary Clinton’s astroturf candidacy is in full swing in Iowa.
Her Tuesday morning visit to a coffee shop in LeClaire, Iowa was staged from beginning to end, according to Austin Bird, one of the men pictured sitting at the table with Mrs. Clinton.
Bird told Daily Mail Online that campaign staffer Troy Price called and asked him and two other young people to meet him Tuesday morning at a restaurant in Davenport, a nearby city.
Price then drove them to the coffee house to meet [Mrs.] Clinton after vetting them for about a half-hour.
The three got the lion’s share of Mrs. Clinton’s time and participated in what breathless news reports described as a “roundtable”—the first of many in her brief Iowa campaign swing.
Bird himself is a frequent participant in Iowa Democratic Party events. He interned with President Obama’s 2012 presidential re-election campaign, and was tapped to chauffeur Vice President Joe Biden in October 2014 when he visited Davenport.
The other two participants in the “roundtable,” according to Bird, were the president of the University of Iowa College Democrats and a Planned Parenthood employee. The Mail also reports that at least three of the “everyday Americans” featured in Mrs. Clinton’s introductory video “were actually partisans with political connections”—including “a former campaign manager for Wendy Davis,” who got trounced in last year’s race for Texas governor.
Antle’s conclusion:
Hillary Clinton is a deeply flawed politician whose staff has basically swaddled her in bubble wrap to avoid a repeat of the 2008 disaster at the hands of Barack Obama. They hope if she avoids spontaneity and tough interviews, even to shush the reporters, the voters will not notice she is the same candidate they already rejected, just older and with fewer emails.
Maybe it’s an idea crazy enough to work. But it doesn’t suggest a whole lot of confidence.
If you read the left-wing commentary about Mrs. Clinton, “confidence” is not the word that comes to mind. “But I am not excited about Hillary Clinton. At all,” writes think-tanker Conor Williams at Talking Points Memo:
Very little about [Mrs.] Clinton’s policy positions animates me—other than her strong support for early childhood education (which is my professional expertise), I don’t find her substantively compelling. Indeed, I find her hawkish approach to foreign policy repellent.
He even has mixed feelings about electing a female president. On the one hand, “I want that first female presidency to come to the country as soon as possible.” On the other, “there’s something wrong with a straight white male voter who tells himself that he should vote for the female candidate simply because she has a strong chance of becoming the first female president.”
But in the end he’ll vote for her because “the Republicans remain unlikely to nominate a candidate who meets even the basic qualifications for seriousness on big issues like climate change, economic inequality, social mobility, and more.” He observes, with considerably more verbiage than the following paraphrase, that “once you’ve conclusively ruled out one of the two major parties,” your only alternative is the other one.
Tish Durkin is in the same boat. She spends 1,200 words at the New Republic going through a long list of objections to Mrs. Clinton before coming around to the view that she’s not as bad as the other guys:
Anyone who is anything other than an ideologically conservative Republican or a dyed-in-the-wool Clinton hater—that is, anyone who is not already anti-Hillary—is going to start asking:
Just how entitled, inevitable, chilly, played-out, or whatever would Clinton have to appear in order for Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Marco Rubio to strike me as appealing presidential prospects?
If, as her critics routinely sniff, the million miles of globetrotting that Clinton logged as secretary of state don’t really count as foreign-policy experience, precisely what credit is due to Chris Christie’s “trade missions” to the far corners of London and Mexico, or the—wow!—“hours-long” neocon tutorials that The Washington Post has reported Scott Walker getting in the Taft Room of the Willard Intercontinental Hotel in Washington, D.C.?
Actually, you don’t have to be “an ideologically conservative Republican or a dyed-in-the-wool Clinton hater” to consider voting against Hillary in November 2016. You just have to be something other than a committed Democrat.
Of course committed Democrats are rather plentiful, and it’s possible Mrs. Clinton will win over—or the GOP nominee will repel—enough of the less partisan and ideological voters to emerge victorious 18½ months hence. But it speaks to her weakness as a candidate that even people who are certain to vote for her are at such pains to convince themselves that they should.
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