BRET STEPHENS: HILLARY’S CYNICAL SONG OF SELF
http://www.wsj.com/articles/hillarys-cynical-song-of-self-1430177134
The Clintons are counting on America to digest their ethical lapses the way a python swallows a goat.
Recently I wrote a column about Hillary Clinton’s method of lying: bald deceit sold to liberals with a wink-and-nod as the price of advancing a progressive agenda in this bigoted country of ours. Several readers wrote me to object that the mendacity I ascribed to Mrs. Clinton applied equally to Republicans.
Maybe. But what was striking about these critics is that none of them bothered to rebut the point that Mrs. Clinton is a habitual liar who treats truthfulness in politics the way a calorie-counting diner might treat hollandaise sauce on steak: to be kept strictly on the side or dribbled on in measured doses. Her lying has become as much a given in the liberal mind as Bill Clinton’s womanizing: He does his thing, she does hers.
Get over it.
All of which means that Mrs. Clinton’s presidential bid is an exercise in—and a referendum on—cynicism, partly hers but mainly ours. Democrats who nominate Mrs. Clinton will transform their party into the party of cynics; an America that elects Mrs. Clinton as its president will do so as a nation of cynics. Is that how we see, or what we want for, ourselves?
This is what the 2016 election is about. You know already that if Mrs. Clinton runs for president as an Elizabeth Warren-style populist she won’t mean a word of it, any more than she would mean it if she ran as a ’90s-style New Democrat or a ’70s-style social reformer. The real Hillary, we are asked to believe, is large and contains multitudes.
Opinion Journal Video
In other words, she’s singing a Song of Herself. She will say, do, and be pretty much anything to get elected. And the rest of us are supposed to fall in line because we prefer our politics to be transactional not principled, our politicians to be opportunists not idealists, and our national creed to be “do what you gotta do” not “upon this rock.” This is what might be called the Clinton Bargain: You can always count on their self-interest trumping other considerations, so you never have to fear that they can’t be bought.
The only question is who is doing the buying.
In recent days we’ve begun to learn some of their names: a Ukrainian billionaire with pro-Western politics and business interests in Iran; a Canadian mining magnate who once testified, in the New Yorker, that “all my chips, almost, are on Bill Clinton,” because “he can do things and ask for things that no one else can.”
More such names will drop, along with the coincidences of meetings taken, approvals granted, donations received and emails deleted. And the Clintons’ answer—beyond the usual lines about “right-wing attacks” and “tired old stories” and “it’s all for a good cause”—will once again be: Get over it.
Will we?
Cynicism is the great temptation of modern life. We become cynics because we desperately don’t want to be moralists, and because earnestness is boring, and because skepticism is a hard and elusive thing to master. American education, by and large, has become an education in cynicism: Our Founders were rank hypocrites. Our institutions are tools of elite coercion. Our economy perpetuates privilege. Our justice system is racist. Our foreign policy is rapacious. Cynicism gives us the comfort of knowing we won’t be fooled again because we never believed in anything in the first place. We may not be born disabused and disenchanted, but we get there very quickly.
This is the America that the Clintons seek to enlist in their latest presidential quest. I suspect many Democrats would jump at an opportunity not to participate in the exercise—it’s why they bolted for Barack Obama in 2008—and would welcome a credible primary challenger. (Run, Liz, Run!) But they will go along with it, mostly because liberals have demonized the Republican Party to the point that they have lost the capacity for self-disgust. Anything—anyone—to save America from a conservative judicial appointment.
As for the rest of the country, Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy offers a test: How much can it swallow? John Podesta and the rest of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign team must be betting that, like a python devouring a goat, Americans will have ample time to digest Mrs. Clinton’s personal ethics. If Peter Schweizer is publishing his “Clinton Cash” book now, it can only mean it will be Stone Age news by the time November 2016 rolls around. Nobody today remembers the names of Susan McDougal,David Hale or Jim Guy Tucker.
That’s one theory, at any rate. Another theory is that, even as the details of the Clintons’ transactions fade from memory, the overall impression will not. Americans may not have liked being led by honest rubes (cf. Jimmy Carter) but they liked the lying crooks even less (cf. Richard Nixon).
There’s an opportunity here for Mrs. Clinton’s opponents, in both parties. The frame for this election is cynicism. Do we succumb to it or not? A candidate who believes in great things—and has a story and a plan to prove it—can beat her.
Comments are closed.
